by Manny Howard
The kids are watching movies in the backseat. Upon our arrival home, we get a call from Lisa’s sister-in-law, Lisa, who consoles Lisa and asks after me, saying that she and Brennan love us and it will pass. People make mistakes and she wants to make sure that we are okay, that I am okay. Lisa talks to her for about an hour; she is reassured and reminded of my better nature. She’s reminded that her family can be intimidating, and that as an outsider herself, she understands what dynamic is at play. At the end of the conversation, her sister-in-law tells her that her checkup earlier that day didn’t go well, the brain cancer is back with a vengeance, and that the doctors cannot operate this time.
Realistic or not, she tells Lisa that she won’t die—she has four kids and will make it for them. She believes it. We want to. They agree to talk in a few days after her latest chemotherapy protocol is outlined. Lisa is distraught after getting off the phone, but she comes to me and opens up to me. She will forgive me. We have Heath’s knee surgery in a few weeks, she says, we need to be strong together.
THE PRICE OF CHICKEN
The Stray, that mature chicken of unknown parentage that Caleb and I adopted at the Agway in Englishtown, New Jersey, turned out to be a laying hen. She is still hideous, her plumage still a travesty. When it finally grows, it does so in tussocks, and her legs and feet remain scabrous, swollen, revolting.
Toward the end of June, after some cursory book learning, I conclude The Stray may be recovering from her eighteen-month molt, a developmental stage of some laying hens that coincides with the onset of a hen’s most productive egg-laying period. According to the author Gail Damerow, a fabled chicken whisperer, if a hen’s plumage is lacking, supplementing the bird’s diet with dry cat food should fix the bird right up, as the cat chow is high in animal protein and, unlike dog food, contains no grain. As an aside, Damerow writes that cat food also has the effect of kick-starting egg production.
As I stand on the driveway outside the barn, gripping her masterwork, A Guide to Raising Chickens: Care, Feeding, Facilities, loosely in dirty, sweat-soaked hands, The Stray’s potential as a laying hen opens a whole universe of possibility to me. And once eggs (“Of course! Eggs!”) enter my imagination, they immediately become indispensable to the remotest possibility of the success of The Farm.
Maybe I do puzzle briefly over why eggs had never been a deliberate part of my plan before this. I don’t recall it, if I did. It is possible, I suppose, that because the chickens were a stand-in for meat rabbits, I’d never really considered them as a source for eggs. But suddenly I could, on occasion, switch an omelet for roast chicken in the evenings, maybe even have lunch once in a while. Breakfast, good Christ in heaven. I could eat eggs for breakfast rather than chicken.
I retreat to the living room, trailing filth as I walk, place an order for eight juvenile, called “started” in the catalogs, pullets from an online hatchery. I fish through my pockets for some cash, hand it to Caleb, and ask him to buy a big box of Whiskas dry cat food and, looking at the position of the sun in the sky and then my wristwatch, a six-pack of beer.
I have high hopes.
My optimism is further buoyed when, only a few days after being fed nothing but Whiskas dry cat food, The Stray produces a warm brown egg. She seems as surprised by this development as I am, and while physically quite nasty, her feathers do begin to grow back in more vigorous clumps than before. The Stray is enormously productive, laying one egg a day for four days.
However, on the fifth day The Stray eats her own egg before I can get my hands on it, and the taste of her own egg has the same effect on a hen (any hen) that crack has on an addict. Apparently, nothing else will do. I don’t tumble to this until four days later when the score is three to one in her favor. What ensues is a battle for every additional egg.
The Stray lives in a wire cage with a sloping floor designed specifically to preserve eggs. The theory: bird lays the egg, the egg rolls out of the cage. The bird—very dumb—never notices it was there in the first place. This cage-design theory appears to fall apart if, by some twist of fate, the hen inside it gets a gobful of her own yolk. Then she learns to defeat the design, whirling around as the prize leaves her egg vent and shattering it with her beak. The hen then snorts up whatever does not run through the wire floor onto the filthy guano tray below.
The Farm gives with one hand and takes with another. It is folly to assume otherwise; a hopeless charity case begins contributing to the project, and days later I am locked in a battle with her for every egg she produces. My first jerry-rigged layer-cage design alteration is to increase the angle of floor of the cage and then, after bitter experience, to pad the wire egg-catcher beyond the cage so that the shell does not crack as it tumbles, at speed, away from the hen inside. I get two eggs before The Stray learns to crane her neck through the same break in the wire that allows the egg to pass beyond the cage’s wire walls.
I lose one more to The Stray’s perverse obsession until I respond by stringing wire in the front of the cage from floor to ceiling. This rig gets me three eggs before, with a junkie’s furious ingenuity, the hen learns to weave through the wires and stretch and contort her neck beyond the confines of the cage just as before. I replace the forest of wire with a sheet of mesh in the front of the cage that gives The Stray just enough room to assume the laying posture, but creates a secondary floor in the cage wide enough so that no matter how much she strains—and she does strain—she cannot reach beyond the front wall of the cage.
Two weeks later a deeply confused UPS deliveryman shows up with a cardboard carry case containing the flock of juvenile layers. At seventeen weeks old, they are on the cusp, one week away from laying one egg a day for as long as eight years. I segregate the layers and the meat birds, housing all nine in a cage meant for four full-grown birds. I figure that I’ll move the layers into the coop and the run after I have harvested all the meat birds. Once in polite company, The Stray stops eating her own eggs.
Uncoupled from a world that provides two scrambled eggs on a roll for $3, I now know the true price of an egg for breakfast—one without the roll, or so I think.
I reach for the plastic Kool-Aid pitcher we use as a scoop for the chicken food, measure out an equal portion of cracked corn and pellets, and add a few handfuls of ground oyster shells. It occurs to me that though we purchased one hundred pounds of feed, we will run out of food before we know it. The greatest challenge to urban agriculture is that everything you need is sold in the country. No local pet stores carry chicken feed—this comes as no surprise but maybe the proprietors should consider changing that policy. When, eventually, I find a supplier relatively nearby, the outfit is billed as a lumberyard. It’s on Rockaway Boulevard, just over the Queens border. I make the drive a few days later. The proprietor is a tall, frail man with a hound’s face dominated by an impressive auburn cowcatcher mustache. He wears a plaid shirt from Sears and a trucker’s cap sporting the name of his livestock-feed supplier, Blue Label. It seems that livestock supply is the profit center of what was once a considerable lumber operation. I ask Cowcatcher if he carries layer pellets and crack corn. He does not look up from the delivery receipt he is examining, simply motions through a pair of doors to a vast room at the back of the store. Most of the barnlike room is a lumber library, stocked with what looks to me like a pretty good quality selection of hardwood. Stacked in neat rows across from what lumber is left in the inventory are bags of animal feed of every description: homing pigeons and horses, rabbits and chickens among them.
I deposit a pair of fifty-pound paper sacks of feed on the counter. We make eye contact. I smile more enthusiastically than I had intended.
“You raising chickens?” Cowcatcher asks, inspecting the sacks in front of him.
“I am.”
“Nearby?”
“Not so close.” I’m cagey because, while it is not illegal to own chickens within city limits, as long as they are not roosters (noise complaints), I doubt it is legal to run an operation with as m
any chickens as I have presently.
“Oh yeah, where?”
“Flatbush.” So much for discretion; I really have got to learn to shut my mouth.
“That’s a hike.”
“It’s not so bad,” I say, signing the credit-card voucher.
“Is that legal? The chickens? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No. Not entirely. It’s a gray area,” I lie, exhaling while I hoist both bags onto my shoulders.
“You need help carrying that?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“Well, good luck.”
“You, too.”
The second time I visit, a month or so later, Cowcatcher remembers me.
“The feed still in the back?” I ask.
“Yup.” He follows me out from behind the counter and shadows me to the warehouse out back. “You’re the one from Flatbush, right?” he asks, confident that he is correct.
“That’s me.”
“How’re the birds?”
“Doing good. Eating a lot, though.”
“They do do that,” agrees Cowcatcher amicably.
“You raise chickens, too?”
“Me? Lord no! Not that there’s anything wrong. Just, even if I wanted to, my wife would never allow it.”
“Unh-huh.” I pull two bags from a flat of twenty. There are at least eight flats of each variety of bird food. I help myself to a sack of rabbit kibble. We talk about his lumber. I remark that it looks like really good stuff. Cowcatcher asks me if I know wood. Not as much as I would like is my reply.
He nods. “Funny thing. When my partner said he wanted to start stocking feed for livestock, I thought he’d lost his mind. ‘We’re a lumberyard, Stan,’ I said. But what the hell, right?”
“What the hell.”
“Well, you know what, there are a lot of people like you in this city. Not like you, you,” Cowcatcher clarified. “I mean chicken people, a lot of chicken people, and all kinds of people. I get a guy from Barbados in here. Some lady all the way from Iran. They’re all buying chicken food. And you aren’t the one who comes from farthest away. People come from all over the place.”
“Yeah?” I say, my knees buckling under the weight as I heft all three sacks on my shoulder.
“You need help carrying that?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“Yup,” says Cowcatcher, wonder in his voice. “Stan was right, all right. Today, I’d say, half of our sales come from livestock supplies—bowls and bridles and leashes as well as food.”
“That right?”
“Unh-huh, there are a lot of chicken people in that city,” he says, nodding west toward the city limits.
“Hunh,” I say, signing the credit-card voucher. “It’s a lot of work.” I carry two of the three sacks out to the truck. I return, hoist the third bag onto my shoulder, and nod thank-you and good-bye.
“You need help carrying that?” calls Cowcatcher as I reach the front door.
“No thanks. I’m good.”
“Well, good luck.”
In the afternoon Caleb and I grind out most of a high-rise coop in a few hours. So that the coop takes up a minimum of the garden’s square footage, we settle on an Escheresque design, a vertical coop alive with a tangle of ramps and roosts. We equip it with wheels so that it can be wheeled to and fro; the guano can thus easily be removed from underneath it. We fashion tracks for the wheels out of eight-foot-long aluminum building studs so the coop won’t get bogged down in mud or said guano. It has a deeply sloping roof. Remembering that egg production is dependent on available light—we assume that maximizing natural light will positively impact the general well-being of the males—we choose opaque, corrugated plastic. To maximize ventilation we leave about one foot of the walls of the coop open below the roof, sheathing it in chicken wire. When we’re done with the first phase of construction, the coop dominates the skyline, towering over the cedar fence.
At about five thirty Caleb scrubs up and gets on his bike to get home in time to tidy up and attend his bartending class. At six thirty I am putting the finishing touches on the coop. I descend into the basement to set up the table saw.
When I was a kid, my mother and Marty, my stepfather, started building a modest real estate empire in Sunset Park. The plan was to purchase nearly derelict buildings, renovate them, and sell them off. The flipping scheme fell apart quickly, after my mother, having grown fond of the houses, refused to sell them, cajoling Marty into renting them. Eventually they had acquired half a dozen buildings, and in addition to one and a half full-time teaching jobs, Marty served as the superintendent for all of the buildings. While they were acquiring this mini-empire, their children, my cousin Gabe, Josh, and any other friends looking for beer money served as the construction crew. Marty is a gifted teacher. Even as teens we had serviceable rough carpentry skills and some piss-poor plumbing techniques. We could pack a Dumpster so tight with framing timber, linoleum tile, and bathroom and kitchen fixtures that the relative density of the contents approached that of pig iron. One immutable rule on Marty’s site was that, every afternoon, the tools got unplugged at four thirty sharp. There is always plenty of work to do on the job after four thirty—sweeping mostly—he would say if we protested, almost finished and wanting to conclude some daylong slog. The crew is tired and careless. This way, he argued, everybody leaves the site with all his parts still working and attached. It’s a good rule. I have always followed it, until today.
Inspired by the coop design in Nick Park’s animated film Chicken Run, I am using the table saw to mill one-eighth-inch plywood into strips to make toeholds for the door ramp when I inadvertently cut my pinkie at the second knuckle. It is almost entirely off, the joint no longer holds the finger to the rest of my hand, just dangles from a ribbon of flesh on the palm side. Bone and meat and blood—everything inside the finger a moment ago is spattered on my glasses and face, on the saw table, or in the tool’s sawdust bag. I flip my hand away from my body so the limp joint unfolds, then with deliberation belying my inner panic, I flop my entire hand on top of my head and, two steps at a time (can’t pass out alone in the basement, after all), ascend from the basement to the kitchen. Right hand still resting on my head, tendrils of blood leaching from my sheared, sweaty hair and running down the left side of my face, I open the freezer and scoop all the ice from the icemaker.
Living a little more than five miles from where one was born often has its advantages. I pry my cell phone out of my work pants using my left hand, holding my right hand above my head, and call Josh.
“Hey,” he answers, used to calls from me for advice or assistance or a tool loan.
“I cut my hand.”
“Oh, yeah?” He half laughs, grown prepared, over the years, for dramatic announcements from me that segue into vaguely amusing tales of misadventure or humiliation. He waits a moment for my response, but I’m drifting, say nothing. “How bad?”
“Finger’s pretty much off.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s wrapped in this dish towel … ice … I’m calming down now. Afraid to look, though.”
“I’m coming over now,” says Josh, who, an indeterminable time later, marches through the front door, down the hall, and into the kitchen and produces a few well-meaning clucks at the sight of me standing weak-kneed at the kitchen sink, covered in blood. He field dresses the mangled wound, then sets about calling all the various matrons who run our universe. From my makeshift plywood desk, still dominating the living room, he makes inquiries about the best hand surgeon in the tribe while I stand around gripping what is left of the pinkie of my right hand, primate-fear grin plastered on my face.
Not only do I not call Lisa to let her in on my little mishap, I am hoping like hell that we can get clear of the house before she returns from work with the kids. Lisa’s not good with blood, certainly not lots of it. I injure myself seriously with startling regularity, and on the occasions that Lisa has accompanied me to the emergency room, her v
asovagal sensitivity has required that she also be treated or tended by the staff. I have a sneaking suspicion that a nasty wound like this—especially one associated with farmwork—will not go over all that well. Just as we leave the house for the doctor’s office, Lisa arrives in the limousine with Alvin, her driver, and the kids. “Lord! We’re screwed,” I breathe to Josh.
“No. I see an opportunity here,” Josh replies.
“Hon, I’ve banged up my finger and I need to go to the doctor,” I say through a rictus grin. “Don’t worry, Josh is going with me.”
“How? How bad?” she asks.
“Not too bad. With the table saw.”
“Uh-oh,” says Josh.
“What?” cries Lisa. “Kids, get inside! Now!”
“Can we use your car?” asks Josh, stepping next to the open passenger door of the Town Car and between me and Lisa, who is two-stepping at the curb, one step toward me, then retreating. Fingers on both hands are outstretched at her sides, flexing in disbelief.