The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  “Five!”

  “The priest will allow you to bring only one chicken,” said Lucy. “It’s the rule.”

  “Five!”

  “One, Wyatt. One is all we can bring. It’s the rule. We have to follow the rules.”

  “Five!” He arched his back and spit in Lucy’s face.

  “No spitting, Wyatt,” said Lucy. “That hurts my feelings.”

  He spit at her again.

  Owen walked down the stairs. He’d heard all of it, of course. It was impossible to miss.

  “Hey, buddy,” Owen said. “How about three chickens?”

  Wyatt instantly relaxed. He stopped arching his back, he stopped spitting, even his face went from red back to normal, seemingly on a dime. He looked up at his dad and said, “Okay.”

  Lucy looked at Owen like she wanted to strangle him. “How are we going to get three chickens to the church and then down the aisle to be blessed?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  “They can’t just walk around, Owen,” said Lucy. “There’s going to be a million animals inside that place. It’s going to be a madhouse.”

  “Wyatt and I will figure it out, right, Wyatt?” said Owen. “It can be like a science project.”

  * * *

  Susan Howard was peeking out from the window in the church tower, having a moment.

  She’d arrived at the church before seven to get everything arranged, had set out the programs she’d had printed up, put out the brand-new guest book she’d purchased for the event so they could have a record of who attended so the new members’ committee could follow up with a phone call and a visit. The day promised to be unseasonably warm, which Susan thought was nice, a pop of Indian summer late in October after two and a half weeks of nonstop rain. It would be enough to coax some of the fence-sitters out of their homes, she thought. Snow was just around the corner.

  Susan liked being a deacon at St. Andrews—she enjoyed teaching Sunday school, once she got the hang of it, and she liked having a base from which to launch her rockets of community enlightenment—but there was no getting around the fact that St. Andrews attracted a certain sort of person. A certain sort of family, actually.

  Not the Jesus freaks, to be sure. The true believers went to Sunny Valley Community Church, which was a half-hour drive away and had an active youth group that drew families from all over. The people who ended up at St. Andrews weren’t the believers, they were the behavers. Decent people who’d been forced to go to church as kids and now did the same to their offspring. Parents who viewed attending church as a way to uphold a certain kind of conventionality, a clean-your-plate-obey-your-parents-write-your-thank-you-notes mentality. Susan and Rowan Howard’s kids didn’t clean their plates, obey their parents, or write thank-you notes, and Susan was proud of those facts. When her daughter, Charlotte, showed a people-pleasing, girlish glee in filling out her Common Core worksheets, writing her numbers and letters neatly inside the boxes, Susan nearly pulled her out of Beekman’s public school. She would have, too, if she and Rowan had had the money for private school—something Waldorf-y, filled with Weston Price moms still breastfeeding their six-year-olds—but they didn’t. The only thing Susan’s children lacked were rich grandparents.

  Susan had been elected deacon of St. Andrews two years earlier. She chaired meetings of the garden committee—where five old ladies tangled with two moms fresh from Brooklyn over whether or not to pull out all of the nonnative species in the church gardens—and she policed the Friday-night sorting party for the annual tag sale, cracking down on women who seemed to think that volunteering to organize the donated items was their chance to cart off all the best stuff. No one could say that Susan Howard didn’t pull her weight. She did her dharma to the staid, traditional God of St. Andrews, and she didn’t complain.

  But today’s service was going to be different. It was progressive, it was community focused, it was decidedly non-species-ist. It was everything Susan wanted St. Andrews to be. She felt a little like she imagined a new pope must feel, the thrill of shaking up an ancient institution from the inside, from a position of power, but with humility and selflessness and grace.

  Susan snapped out of her reverie and hurried down the stone steps. Rowan and the kids and the three baby goats would be arriving any minute.

  It was time for her to pass out some skirts.

  * * *

  Lucy had solved the kids-in-white problem by putting Wyatt in one of Owen’s white T-shirts, which drooped down nearly to his knees. Wyatt wouldn’t even think about putting on the tights, and he refused to wear a belt, but he was all in white, at least, except for his light-up Spider-Man sneakers. He looked like a member of a doomsday cult.

  Claire’s wagon would have come in handy, Lucy found herself thinking as she watched Owen duct-tape Wyatt’s rolling belly board to the bottom of a big cardboard box. Wyatt had traced three circles on the top of the box and looked on with hand-flapping excitement as Owen cut them out with a big serrated knife. (“It’s knife time!”) Lucy found some old rope in the garage, and Owen taped it all together so that Wyatt could walk in front of the box and pull it along behind him with, ideally, the chickens’ heads poking out of the holes in the top. Lucy didn’t think they’d pop their heads out of the box, but Owen and Wyatt were convinced they’d want to check out the excitement.

  When they got to the church, Owen stuck the box of chickens next to a tombstone and then chased Wyatt around the graveyard for a bit. When they came back over to Lucy, their legs were splattered with mud.

  “By the time I noticed the mud, it was too late, and he was off and running,” Owen explained. “We’ve still got that old beach towel in the back of the car. I thought it was best for him to burn off some energy before all that sitting quietly inside a church.”

  “Fair enough,” said Lucy.

  Susan Howard walked over carrying a pile of skirts.

  “Owen, the men are wearing skirts during the service as a show of solidarity with Colleen Lowell,” she said.

  “I’m not going to wear a skirt, Susan,” said Owen.

  “Please. For me. Just run into the bathroom and slip it on.”

  “Not gonna happen, Susan.”

  “You can wear it over your pants if you want. I won’t object.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Lucy?” Susan looked at Lucy with that fierce intenseness of hers, the intensity that made the mommies of Beekman move mountains on her behalf.

  “I can’t make my husband wear a skirt, Susan. That’s not how our marriage works.”

  Susan sniffed the wind and headed off in search of her next prospect.

  * * *

  Claire had tied the llama to a lamppost and she was eyeballing the other animals, trying to see what sort of lineup would be the most dramatic, when she noticed the bees.

  “Bees, Blake!” Claire shrieked. “Blake! Bees! Bees!”

  Blake froze. Then he burst into tears.

  “Get. Inside. The. Church!” Claire screamed. The llama started its battered-turkey wail again. “Walk slowly! Slowly, Blake! I’ve got the EpiPens.” She turned to her husband and said, “You need to go in there and sit with him. I’ve got to watch the llama.”

  “He’s not going to want to stay inside when all the fun is out here,” Edmund pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, what do we do about the bees, Edmund? Have you noticed there are at least a million bees around here?” Claire said. “Do you want to spend the night with him in the ICU or shall I?”

  “I’ll keep him in the church,” said Edmund. “Can I have your phone so he can play something on it?”

  “Why can’t you use yours?”

  “I need mine,” said Edmund.

  “Right. To play something on,” said Claire. She took her phone out of her bag. “Here. Take it.”

  Andrew Callahan, who had overheard the entire thing, said to Claire, “Those are Gordon Allen’s bees.”

  “What?” asked Claire. “
What are you talking about?”

  “Gordon Allen put half a million honeybees on his land so he could qualify for an agricultural tax exemption. Those bees cost the town of Beekman tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes each year.”

  “Are you serious?” said Claire.

  “It’s in the town tax rolls,” said Andrew. “They’re public record.”

  “My son can die of a bee sting,” said Claire. “I don’t want half a million unnecessary bees around here because a fucking billionaire doesn’t want to pay his fair share of the taxes.”

  “Well, you could sue him if your kid got stung.”

  Claire cocked her head and looked at Andrew with a plastered-on smile. “You mean if my child were dead? I could sue Gordon Allen? Does that sound like a good outcome to you?”

  Susan walked over and said to Claire, “I just talked to Edmund. He says he won’t wear a skirt.”

  Claire sighed a big wifely sigh. “Oh, just hand it to me,” she said. “Keep an eye on the llama. I’ll take care of it.”

  * * *

  Between Claire’s frantic bee freak-out, which sent at least three toddlers wailing into their moms’ arms, and the Larkin twins screaming that they wanted to ride “the stupid pony or whatever it is”—not to mention the sullen, hungover husbands who exchanged grim glances to acknowledge they’d normally be teeing off on the back nine and cracking open their fifth IPA beer on any other Sunday as beautiful as this one was shaping up to be—the event was starting to look like a fiasco.

  But just then, the opening chords of Bach’s “Air on the G String” floated up from the church organ, out through the open stained-glass windows, and up through the trees, piercing the achingly blue sky. It was a piece of music that never failed to reach deep inside Lucy and evoke what she thought of as the purest, best part of herself. The fact that this sublime perfection was being played by the frumpy, never-married church organist Evelyn Bullard somehow added to Lucy’s moment of gratitude.

  The music was the signal for the adults to file into the church. Lucy and Owen got Wyatt and his box of chickens settled in his place in line and then took a seat on the aisle as close to the front as possible. The Reverend Elsbith stood at the altar and got things rolling as quickly as she could, without so much as an opening prayer, acknowledging that there was a long line of children and animals outside the church waiting to be blessed. Still, she invited Colleen and Arlen Lowell to come up and stand with her at the front of the church, “so the children can witness what it means to be an inclusive and welcoming community.” Colleen and Arlen were clearly surprised, but pleased, and they walked to the altar together, holding hands.

  Local supermom Gloria Mulligan had commandeered the Genslers’ Jewish turtle for her triplets to pull in the procession, and she’d covered a Radio Flyer wagon so densely with homemade white-tissue-paper flowers you could barely tell it was actually red. It took at least two Mulligan boys to pull the fifty-pound reptile, so whichever one was left out walked alongside for a few steps and then slugged his nearest brother and took his turn pulling the wagon. Then came a line of sweet girls wearing white dresses and holding cats, and a redhead who was carrying a birdcage with two chattering parakeets. Terrence Long was next, wearing a white tuxedo and carrying a glass bowl housing what was surely the only surviving member of last year’s second-grade nature-studies unit on crayfish. Tobias Bang shuffled along behind Terrence, palpably bored, carrying a nearly dead garter snake he’d found in his backyard four days earlier and stuck in a thirty-two-ounce mason jar just for this occasion. Then came the four-year-old dick with the guinea pig, which was out of its cage, tucked under the dick kid’s arm like a furry football.

  When Wyatt appeared at the end of the aisle, holding the rope, pulling his chickens behind him, Lucy found herself not merely teary, but on the brink of weeping. She took Owen’s hand and squeezed it. Wyatt was walking on his tiptoes, with his eyes on the ground, completely focused on the task. The chickens weren’t popping their heads out of the holes in the box as planned, but still, Wyatt was participating. Just like a normal kid, Lucy thought. Exactly like all the other kids.

  Brannon Anderson was trailing along several feet behind Wyatt with his family’s large yet gentle Italian Spinone hound by his side. Then came the three Howard kids, each with a baby Nubian goat that Susan had wrangled, not without difficulty, from Beekman’s famous local goat-cheese lady/part-time chanteuse. Then came Rocco Allen, Gordon Allen’s kid, with a large Doberman on one of those retractable leashes. A few more kids with dogs were clustered in the back of the church, waiting their turn, and Claire and Blake and the llama were tucked in the vestibule, clearly meant to be the big finish.

  Wyatt had made it about halfway up the aisle when Cacciatore popped her head out of one of the holes and started to cluck. Cacciatore was a buff Polish chicken, and the elaborate feathers sticking out of the top of her head made her look like Kate Middleton at Ascot. Cacciatore clucked some more, and Wyatt looked back at his wheelie-cardboard-box contraption and smiled; the chicken-head holes worked! Wyatt stopped walking altogether, and Charlotte Howard’s baby goat butted its head into the cardboard box and bleated while the rest of the procession came to a temporary halt.

  Before anyone knew what was happening, the church echoed with the high-pitched zip! of a retractable dog leash rapidly unspooling. Rocco Allen’s Doberman lunged past the three baby goats and the Italian hound and the startled children, pounced on top of the cardboard box, and set about shredding it with his nails and teeth.

  The next few minutes were more or less a blur. Rocco dropped his end of Fang’s leash and jumped on top of a pew near the back of the church, and the plastic part skipped halfway down the slate aisle, clicking and clacking as it quickly respooled itself. The goats froze, startled by either the dog attacking the chickens or the surprisingly loud plastic-on-slate clacking noise, and then ran in different directions through the pews, tripping over the feet of the stunned parishioners. “Grab the leash!” someone yelled, but no one was brave enough to try. Sunny Bang darted over and scooped up Wyatt, and the Howard kids ran down the aisle, away from the dog and the box.

  Kiev and Cacciatore were both Polish chickens, which meant they could, in a pinch, fly about twelve feet in the air, which was what Kiev immediately did. Fang got a mouthful of Cacciatore’s tail feathers and just enough flesh to draw blood before Cacciatore broke free and shot up into the air, flapping over the heads of the shrieking congregants. Fat Black, however, was an Australorp, a breed known for its large size and inability to fly. Fang sank his teeth into Fat Black’s neck and shook her back and forth for what felt like an eternity, blood and feathers flying. Louisa of the many white tights had let go of her cat—actually, pretty much all of the girls had let go of their cats—and a few of them started clawing their way up the church’s rustic burlap banners with the words Spirit and Hope and Community spelled out in green felt letters. Claire struggled to keep the llama under control, but it broke free and galloped up the center aisle, skirting the bloody chicken melee, then turned left at the altar, ran down the side aisle, raced past a stunned Claire, and shot out the main door.

  Screams of kids and parents—it was hard to tell which—filled the church. Two husbands who were volunteer firefighters began evacuation procedures, leading the blood-spattered throng out through the wide doors.

  Brannon Anderson had let go of his family’s sixteen-hundred-dollar purebred hound and was jumping up and down with excitement, soaking in everything and yelling at the top of his lungs, “This is fucked up! This is so fucked up!”

  Susan Howard stalked past him and said, “Oh, shut up, you little shit.”

  Lucy found Owen and Wyatt outside next to the car. Someone must have called 911 because a police car, sirens blaring, pulled into the parking lot. Meanwhile, Claire was frantically rushing up to each person, grabbing both arms, and yelling, “Have you seen the llama? Where is the fucking llama!” Apparently the police officers mi
stook Claire for an emotionally disturbed person—and the likely cause of the 911 call—because they were approaching her slowly from behind. Lucy noticed one of the officers had her hand on her Taser.

  Just then the source of Claire’s hysteria appeared, trotting madly toward the church graveyard, clearly panicked and making a shrill and very loud sound, louder even than the earlier bag-of-turkeys sound.

  “Don’t shoot it!” yelled Claire, having become aware of the police officers. “Don’t you fucking shoot! It’s borrowed!”

  Claire charged into the graveyard, which caused the llama to bolt through a flower bed and run straight into the two-hundred-and-seventy-year-old headstone of the town’s founder, Nelson Orion Beekman, cracking it in two.

  * * *

  “Fat Black is extinct!”

  Wyatt was in the kitchen, flapping his hands frantically and pacing from one of his plastic grass sensory mats to the other, wearing a bloody T-shirt that hung down past his knees. If anyone had caught a glimpse of him, he would have been carted off by child protective services immediately.

  “I watched him get killed!”

  “Let me take your shirt off, buddy,” said Owen.

  “It’s got blood all over it!”

  “Yes,” said Owen. “Yes, indeed, it does.”

  “My shirt is covered in Fat Black’s blood!”

  “Yes, let’s take it off and I’ll put it in the wash,” said Lucy. She wasn’t going to wash it, she was going to throw it in the trash immediately, but she didn’t need to tell Wyatt that. He might protest. Wyatt protested the oddest things. “I’m really, really sorry you had to see that, Wyatt.”

  “I watched Fat Black get murdered! At church!”

  “It was very sad. Are you feeling sad?”

  “There was blood everywhere!”

  “I’m gonna pull this shirt off over your head right now, buddy,” said Owen. “It might feel a little sticky.”