When Hap finishes, they walk back to Tink’s. Tink pays for the witching in cash. They drive back to the swamp. Rhea recognizes the three chickens immediately, just as Joon expected. She calls them by name and sets them free. They immediately join the Buff Orpingtons. The Buff rooster—Joon named him Rooster von Klinckowstroem after the great German dowser—immediately goes after Junior Jr., sensing that he was once The Rooster and needs a readjustment in attitude. Junior Jr. quickly accepts his new station. Then Rooster von Klinckowstroem hops on the back of Leili. It is what roosters do. “I’ve got another surprise,” Joon says as they watch.
Rhea studies his twitching cheeks. “Not a good one, I gather.”
“Donna’s pregnant,” he says.
That night they cuddle on an air mattress on the plywood floor of their unfinished house. “Maybe now’s the time to go see your dad,” Joon says.
Rhea is not upset with him. He’s tried to talk her into seeing her father a thousand times. “The baby means he’s finally accepted my death,” she says. “Why upset the applecart?”
Thirty-six
Rhea Cassowary’s brown egg business is up to thirty dozen a week—thirty-one when Louise Hoyle’s arthritis takes a vacation and she can bake her famous poppyseed kuchens.
Joon and Grampa Hap still marvel at how many dozens Rhea sells. After all, Bear Swamp Road dead-ends into a swamp and anybody who wants eggs from Rhea’s free-roaming flock has to go way out of their way. “It’s the swamp bugs and the worms,” Rhea tells her customers when they rave about the big brown eggs. “The windblown seeds. The freedom.”
There are about a hundred chickens in the flock now. From April to November the chickens roost wherever they like—in trees, on top of the trucks, on the arms of Hap’s many broken lawn chairs. In the winter they huddle inside the low-roofed coop Joon bought from Bud Miller. Joon had to take it apart, board by board, and then reassemble it.
Yes, the brown eggs are good. And getting better. Bigger and richer. Grampa Hap thinks it’s the new genes being introduced into the flock by George Herbert Walker Bush. He’s The Rooster now. Rooster von Klinckowstroem died trying to swallow a wasp and Junior Jr. died trying to mount one of the feral cats. That freed the way for George Herbert Walker Bush, whose ancestry goes all the way back to Maximo Gomez, the Black Spanish cockerel rescued from a Cuban brothel by Chuck Cowrie, during the Spanish-American War.
This warm May morning Rhea is trying to get the lawnmower started. Joon bought it last summer at a yard sale. It starts hard. Sometimes not at all. Midway through her seventh unsuccessful pull she sees a car coming down the hill. She hopes it’s Gammy Betz and not another egg customer.
It’s been two weeks since she called her grandmother. It was while Joon and Hap were dowsing a well down in Union County. “Hello?” the woman on the other end said.
“Hello,” Rhea said. “Is this Betsy Betz?”
“Yes it is,” the woman said.
“Gammy, we have to talk,” Rhea said.
And they did talk, on the phone that morning two weeks ago—running up an enormous long-distance bill—and again the next day in the almost-finished living room of the new house on the knob above Hap’s trailer. And now, just twenty-one hours before the wedding, Rhea’s grandmother is driving up again, to walk her down the aisle and give her to James Faldstool, Jr.
Her grandmother had begged her to call her father—to tell him she is alive, beautiful and featherless, and about to be married—but she’d stopped begging as soon as she saw it wasn’t going to do any good. Gammy Betz always knew when enough was enough. “Okay,” she said, “it’s your wedding. But as soon as that wedding music starts you’re going to regret it.”
“Probably,” said Rhea. “But there’s just so much ugly stuff between Daddy and me. Who knows what Daddy would do at the wedding. You know how he gets when there’s too much pressure. I don’t want him throwing dishes or jumping up and down on the cake. So we’ll save the reunion for another time, Gammy. Though I’m dying to see the new baby.”
That’s when her grandmother said, “So am I.”
“You haven’t seen Donna’s baby yet?”
“They’re really protective,” her grandmother said, adding in a whisper, “They’re not saying anything, but I think the baby has Donna’s allergies.”
The car pulls up. The cloud of dust that followed it down the hill settles. It is Gammy Betz. Her husband has come, too. He pops the trunk and takes out a beautifully wrapped package that could only be a toaster oven.
Dr. Pirooz Aram, more rumpled than usual in his baggy Saturday shorts, goes to the mailbox. There is the usual collection of catalogs addressed to his wife and the offers of credit cards. There is one hand-written letter that forces him to sit on his front step and read it immediately. The return address simply says GRANDMA!
When the letter is read he stares at his azalea bushes for a while, then goes inside. “Sitareh,” he yells, hoping his wife will hear him over the Yobisch Podka CD filling the house with monotonous New Age harmonies. “Do you remember that patient of mine who was eaten by wolves?”
Sitareh is in the kitchen chopping endive for a salad. “The one with the feathers?” she yells back. “I though it was coyotes!”
“Coyotes? Are you sure, Sitareh? I thought it was wolves.”
“It was coyotes, Pirooz.”
He is in the kitchen now, nibbling first on the endive, then on his wife’s neck. “Anyway, this girl who was eaten by animals has just invited us to her wedding.”
“Are we going?”
“We should, don’t you think?”
And so three Saturdays later, Dr. Pirooz Aram and wife Sitareh drive deep into the state of Ohio, to Acorn County. The letter from GRANDMA! included a map. So they stumble across Bear Swamp Road rather easily.
They first spot the silver trailer and then the almost-completed house on the hill above it. They approach slowly, careful not to hit one of the many loose chickens. “What is it with this family and chickens?” Dr. Aram says to his wife. There is a collection of cars and pickup trucks already parked in a field of tall grass. They park next to a red truck with a blue camper on its back. Dr. Pirooz Aram gets a box from the trunk of his red Toyota. It is wrapped with silver paper. There is a toaster oven inside, something Sitareh says every young American couple needs. Sitareh carries the basket of painted eggs her husband insisted on bringing. They are the ancient Persian symbol of fertility.
A happy young woman runs toward them. She is wearing a short white dress. There is a circlet of yellow roses on her head. “Rhea, is that you?” Dr. Pirooz Aram asks.
She hugs him. “It’s me.”
“Where are your beautiful feathers?”
“Gone.”
“And you weren’t eaten by wolves?”
Rhea walks them, arm-in-arm, past the card tables covered with food and the coolers filled with pop and beer, to the short rows of folding chairs by a great drooping willow. “That fellow in the white tuxedo there, he is your husband?”
“Pretty soon he is,” says Rhea. She sits them next to Jelly Bean and Robert Charles. “A beautiful day for a wedding, isn’t it?” Pirooz says to them, his eyes marveling at their tiny turnip heads.
“Bingo!” answers Robert Charles.
A man starts playing an accordion. People scramble for chairs. Some have to stand.
Joon hugs his mother and then shakes his father’s hand, without words thanking him for keeping their secret all these years. He trots to the willow and stands under a trellis woven thick with water lillies gathered from the swamp.
Now Rhea starts down the aisle, her arm locked in Gammy Betz’s arm.
The service is conducted by a huge woman wearing a bright green pantsuit. Pirooz whispers to Sitareh that she looks like an avocado. Later he will learn that she is Rita Afflatus Ball, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Yellow Springs. To his delight, there is no talk of sacrifice or duty. No talk of better-or-worse. No talk of dea
th. Or parting. There is only talk of love.
Says Rita Afflatus Ball: “We have not gathered here today to marry Rhea and Joon—as if we had the power or the right to do that. Rather, we have gathered as friends and family to acknowledge that they have already married themselves, many years ago, when they were children, and their eyes first met, and burned a secret passageway through space and time, through self and selfishness, through apprehension and vulnerability, so that their souls could freely pass and entwine as one.
“Only Rhea and Joon can say they are married and only Rhea and Joon can decide how long their marriage will last. But Rhea and Joon have loved each other for a long time already, and it is my guess they will love each other for a long time to come. I would not be surprised if it proves to be the better part of eternity. So, Rhea Jeanette Cassowary, it comes to this moment: Are you married to James Harold Faldstool Jr.?”
“I am,” answers Rhea.
“And James Harold Faldstool Jr., are you married to Rhea Jeanette Cassowary?”
“I am,” answers Joon.
“Then why am I talking when we should be eating and dancing?” asks Rita Afflatus Ball.
There is laughter and applause and the man with the accordion starts playing a polka. Rhea and Joon kiss.
Dr. Aram scoops Jelly Bean into his arms. Dances her around the trellis.
“You go, Mrs. Roosevelt!” Robert Charles bellows as he claps to the music.
A meaty red pick-up crackles to the edge of the hill and stops. Below, on the edge of the marsh, glistens a silver house trailer. There are a couple of dozen cars and trucks parked in front of it. One of those trucks has a blue camper on the back. Just up the slope from the silver trailer sits a small house. Behind that house a party is going on. People are dancing. When the driver of the pickup rolls down his window, he hears polka music.
The driver takes his sweaty hands off the steering wheel and presses them against his cold cheeks. He looks to the woman next to him for guidance. She is holding a Kleenex to her nose. Between them, strapped into a plastic safety seat, is a baby. The baby’s yellow sleeper is zipped to the chin. The baby’s yellow knit cap hides everything but a pair of brown eyes and a nubby pink nose.
The woman smiles grimly. The man takes his foot off the brake. As they descend, the FRESH EGGS sign in the back of the truck, wrapped in beautiful blue paper and tied with beautiful white ribbons, rattles and rattles.
Thirty-seven
Rhea Faldstool sits by her mother’s grave, Indian style. Inside the hollow diamond created by her folded legs she places the tiny girl named Joy. Joy is three years old now, squirmy and irritable. Rhea holds her in place with one hand and with the other opens the little book Dr. Pirooz Aram gave her when she was a child.
The wild strawberries already have been eaten and Joon and her father have wandered across the cemetery, searching for the graves of Civil War veterans. Donna is waiting in the truck, with the windows up, afraid of the thick June grass and the pollen-soaked air. So there is just Rhea and Joy and the half of Jeanie Cassowary not in heaven.
The book Dr. Aram gave Rhea, The Conference of the Birds, was written centuries ago by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Rhea used to read it to her chickens at night with a flashlight. It was how she met Joon. It was how she made sense of the many senseless things that were happening to her. She remembers what Dr. Aram wrote to her: “The book is about a journey. And I hope that you will find the time to read it during your journey.”
Rhea hopes the book will help tiny Joy on her journey. It is going to be a difficult journey. She finds the dog-earred page where she left off all those years ago. She reads:
“A world of birds set out, and there remained
But thirty when the promised goal was gained…”
Yes. That’s right. Thousands of birds set out to find their king, the mysterious Simorgh. They were led by the Hoopoe. They flew through seven valleys, each one difficult and dangerous, until only thirty birds were left.
“Thirty exhausted, wretched, broken things,
With hopeless hearts and tattered, trailing wings …”
Joy stops squirming and nestles against Rhea’s puffy belly. There is a baby inside that belly, a baby that won’t be born for another five months. Genetic meddling has seen to it that Joy will be both its aunt and its sister—just as she is already both a sister and a daughter to Rhea. Such are the difficult and dangerous valleys created by this much-too-modern world.
Rhea reads on: The thirty remaining birds finally reach the Simorgh’s palace. A herald warns them to turn back, but they refuse. So the herald unlocks the gate and takes them inside. A hundred veils are drawn back. He leads them through blinding light to a throne and gives each bird a written page, on which their life stories are recorded. Only after they have finished reading do they see their king.
But the king they have endured so much to find is only a mirror. A mirror! And they see only themselves!
The ending does not surprise Rhea one little bit. “Would you like to hear it from the beginning?” she asks. “I can’t read it all today—it’s a long book—but I could read you a little bit?”
“Read,” says Joy. Her voice is as soft and sweet and vulnerable as the peep of a newly hatched chick.
So Rhea flips back to the first page:
“Dear Hoopoe, welcome! You will be our guide…”
Acknowledgments
Sometime in the 1950s my father cut a 26-inch section off a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. He first painted it white, then painted a half-inch black border around it. Then in bright red he painted this:
FRESH EGGS
He screwed hooks into the top of the sign and hung it on a post by the road. For years it swung there, inviting passersby to pull in for a dozen or two.
When the time came for me to begin a new novel in the summer of 1999, that FRESH EGGS sign started swinging in my mind. I searched the barn and found it. I scrubbed off the dust and mouse droppings, hung it on the wall above my computer and started writing. So thanks, Dad, for making that sign. And thanks, Mom, for not tossing it on the burn-up pile.
There are others to thank as well:
Like Karen Davis, Ph.D., whose book Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs, proved to be an important resource, both technically and spiritually.
Like my dear friend and teacher, Dr. Manoucher Parvin, who introduced me to the rich history and culture of his homeland—in particular, the twelfth-century Persian masterpiece, The Conference of the Birds, by Sufi poet Faridud ud-Din Attar.
Like Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi, whose beautiful translation of The Conference of the Birds I used.
Like Martin and Judith Shepard at The Permanent Press for making my dream—and the dreams of so many other writers—come true.
Like Anna Ghosh, my agent in faraway New York, who has waited patiently for me to find my way.
Like the Ohio Arts Council for its generous grant.
Like the helpful people at the Medina County District Library, which during the writing of this book, was named Library of the Year by the American Library Journal.
Like the Biliczky sisters, Carol and Joyce, and that ever-optimistic sheltie of theirs, Biscuit.
Like the little rag-tag flock of Buff Orpingtons and Bantams that run around our little farm here in Hinckley, Ohio.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Rob Levandoski
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1194-5
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