Queen Anne's Lace

by Susan Wittig Albert

  I nodded, thinking about the long gray skirt that Ruby and I had found in the storeroom that morning. “If you were Beth and I were Mrs. March, we’d both be wearing long skirts—and I wouldn’t like it, either.” I wrinkled my nose. “Imagine trying to plant a garden in a long skirt. Or a bustle.”

  “A bustle!” Caitie hooted. “That would be like tying a birdcage to your bottom! How could you ever sit down?” She was silent for a moment. “Anyway, if I were Jo, I wouldn’t have to die. I’d be in the play all the way to the end.” She looked at me. “You haven’t forgotten about the chickens, have you, Mom? Today’s the day they’re supposed to get their baths.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said. Some girls love dogs, others give their hearts to horses. Caitie is crazy about her chickens—twelve, the last time I counted. As she did last year, she plans to enter her favorites in the poultry show at the Adams County Fair, which is a big event in our small town. The chickens have to be checked in at the fairground on Thursday morning, and Tuesday or Wednesday would have been a better bath day. But Caitie has orchestra and play rehearsal on those days, and I have to work. Bathing a chicken is definitely a two-person job (as you know, if you’ve ever done it), and today was the only day we were both free.

  “That’s why we’re stopping at the store,” I added, turning into the supermarket parking lot. “We need dish soap.” According to the people who do this frequently, a mild dish detergent is preferred for bathing chickens.

  “Super,” Caitie said happily. “Dixie Chick just loves it when she gets a bath.” She made a face. “Extra Crispy, not so much.”

  I pulled into a vacant spot beside a big black Dodge RAM crew-cab pickup with a baby seat in the cab and a bumper sticker with a photo of an assault rifle and the words You Can Have My Gun When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands. Texas is open carry now. Most supermarket chains have prohibited guns on their premises, but this store isn’t one of them, so we might meet the driver of this truck cruising the diaper aisle with a baby in her grocery cart and an AR-15 slung over her shoulder. Personally, I don’t think guns and groceries are a good combination so I don’t usually shop here. But the store was on our way home and we were in a hurry. I was making an exception.

  I turned off the ignition. “Dixie Chick and Extra Crispy are the only two you’re showing this year?” Last summer, Caitie entered three chickens and walked away with a first, a second, and a big boost to her confidence. She also learned a lot about chickens from the other chicken fanciers who brought their best birds to the show.

  “Uh-huh.” Caitie made a face. “I promised Silkie-Poo she could go, too, but she’s molting.”

  “Bad timing,” I said. When Silkie-Poo is in possession of all her feathers, she looks like a white feather duster with feet—and five toes instead of the standard-issue four. When she’s molting, she’s covered with weird-looking patches of dusty black skin with prickly little pinfeathers popping out.

  “That’s okay,” Caitie said confidently, getting out of the car. “I’m not sure about Dixie Chick, but Extra Crispy is going to bring home a blue ribbon.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WE live about a dozen miles west of Pecan Springs, down a gravel lane a half mile off Limekiln Road. Our nearest neighbors, Tom and Sylvia Banner, are well out of sight, and the sound of traffic on Limekiln Road is buffered by trees, so it’s almost like living in the middle of the wilderness. The house itself is a large old-fashioned Victorian with a wraparound porch and a round tower, where Caitie has her round fairy-tale bedroom, painted her favorite shade of pink. Behind the house there’s a garage, McQuaid’s workshop, a barn, and Caitie’s chicken coop. And my veggie and herb garden, where I grow quantities of some of the herbs I sell at the shop.

  Caitie’s chickens have hatched quite an enterprise. Last year, she and McQuaid installed a livestreaming “chicken cam” in the pen. The camera feeds images to Caitie’s website—called Texas Chix—so viewers around the world can see what the “Chix” are up to at any given moment. The website features an “About the Chix” page, with photographs of each of the chickens; an “About Caitie” page (no photo, for security reasons); and her blog, Chicken Scratches, where she posts almost every week. Caitie loves answering emails from “friends and followers” who pester her with questions about raising chickens. The whole thing has become a valuable learning experience.

  Extra Crispy is currently Caitie’s only rooster. He is Mr. Personality Plus, a rather spectacular Cubalaya, which is a Cuban breed that dates back to the 1930s. A majestic fowl with a lipstick-red comb and a bright yellow beak, he sports a gleaming orange-red feathery drape over his back and wings and an elegant black tail so long that it sweeps the grass. Caitie hand-raised this gorgeous guy from a scrawny little chick and he’s tame enough to ride around on her shoulder. A plus: Cubalaya roosters have no spurs, which means that Extra Crispy is less likely to rip the skin off our arms when we give him a bath, which he hates.

  Chickens are dirty birds by nature. Caitie’s flock’s favorite spa is a bowl-like depression in the corner of their run, filled with dry dirt and wood ashes. On a hot afternoon, they can all be found there, blissfully tossing dust, fluffing feathers, rolling over, and playing dead. There’s nothing more comical than a chicken indulging in a dust bath.

  But chickens that are candidates for a blue ribbon need a real bath, which means water. Warm water. With soap. In good weather, Caitie and I do this outdoors, because some chickens resent the process. Winchester (our basset) usually offers to referee but I tell him this is not a game. He has to stay indoors.

  Caitie filled a couple of large plastic totes with warm water (one for washing, the other for rinsing) and started with Dixie Chick, a plump, matronly Buff Orpington hen the color of an antique gold watch. Bathing is obviously on Dixie’s bucket list. She loves her bath so much that she falls asleep the minute Caitie starts applying the soap to her feathers and doesn’t wake up until she is fully washed and rinsed. Then, while I hold her, Caitie does her pedicure (chickens have really dirty feet), trims her bill, and rubs her comb and wattles with olive oil to make them glisten. To hasten the drying process, I lay a couple of towels on the grass and Caitie bundles her up like a chicken burrito, head sticking out of one end of the terry towel rollup, feet out of the other.

  When Dixie Chick is drowsing in her burrito-wrap, it’s Extra Crispy’s turn. This guy doesn’t take to bathing with Dixie’s equanimity, and he expressed his feelings with indignant squawks and an irate flapping of wings. By the time we were finished, Caitie and I were nearly as wet as the rooster. But it wasn’t long before both chickens were clean and popped into the clean cages that we set up on the picnic table so their feathers could dry quickly. To speed this along, Caitie went upstairs and got my hair dryer.

  Today’s baths are not quite the end of the process, however. On Thursday morning, Caitie will wash their chicken feet again and rub them with olive oil, check for poopee on their rear ends, and smooth Extra Crispy’s tail with a silk cloth to make it shiny. (Don’t ask me: all I know is that it works.) Then McQuaid will take her and her chickens to the fairgrounds for the big event. That’s the plan, anyway. Like most plans around our house, it’s subject to change.

  While Caitie emptied the plastic totes and put things away, I went upstairs and changed into dry shorts and a T-shirt. When I came back down to the kitchen and looked at the clock, I saw that McQuaid would be home in fifteen minutes. Brian and Casey, his girlfriend, would be along shortly after. It was time to feed Winchester and Mr. P and start putting supper on the table.

  Winchester is our new basset boy, a replacement for the late, lamented Howard Cosell—although no dog could replace Howard in our hearts. Winnie (whom we found at Basset Rescue in Austin) is only three years old. But he’s already seen enough of life to be profoundly pessimistic about the future of our planet and all its resident species, and he frequently
offers his opinion on the subject in melancholy bass-and-tenor basset bays. Winchester’s personal issues are mostly territorial. He has staked a nighttime claim to the entire foot of our bed, insists on anytime access to McQuaid’s leather recliner, and will lunge through the locked screen door whenever a squirrel or crow trespasses in his personal backyard. Another issue still under negotiation: the house rule that bassets are not permitted to have bagels or pizza. When Winchester stands on his hind legs, he is as tall as he is long—which is just tall enough to reach a slice of pizza left carelessly at the edge of the kitchen counter. His own personal rule: if you don’t catch me eating it (or if I reach it before you do), it’s mine.

  In anticipation of dinner, Winchester was stationed beside his bowl, and when I came into the kitchen, he greeted me with an enthusiastic wag of his tail. He knows it’s his bowl, because it has his name on it. W-I-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R, in big orange letters. When I pour his dog food into it, he assumes his flat-basset position with his belly on the floor and a possessive paw on either side of the bowl, counting the kibbles as they cascade past his nose. Then, still prone, he gets down to business immediately and with serious purpose. He growls as he eats (to discourage interlopers), dispatches his dinner quickly, then licks the bowl inside and out. Bassets live for mealtimes.

  We feed Mr. P (aka Pumpkin, because he’s that color) on a shelf in the pantry, out of Winchester’s reach. This cat is a crafty, battle-scarred old tom who showed up on our doorstep starved and sore-pawed and captured Caitie’s heart. I tried to talk her into a kitten instead, but she shook her head.

  “He’s just like me when I first came to live here,” she said, clutching him defiantly. “He doesn’t have any family. He needs somebody to adopt him. He needs me.” When he heard this, Mr. P turned up his purr another notch. He’d been on the lam long enough to know that he had lucked into the deal of nine lifetimes.

  While the dog and the cat were making short work of their dinners, I got out the makings for a green salad and put rice into the rice cooker. The rice would accompany the Moroccan chicken and carrot main dish that had been simmering in the slow cooker all day. I lifted the lid and sniffed the blended aromas appreciatively. Lemon, cinnamon, coriander, cumin. Perfect. All I had to do was ladle it into a large bowl and let people help themselves.

  I had set the table and was just finishing the salad—romaine, mushrooms, red onion rings, chopped tomatoes, sliced cucumbers, diced celery, and hard-cooked eggs—when the kitchen door opened and McQuaid came in. My husband is a big man, six-feet-two and broad-shouldered, with dark hair, pale blue eyes, and a knife scar (a relic of a run-in with a druggie when McQuaid was with Houston Homicide) across his forehead. A craggy-looking guy with a quick grin that never fails to light my fire.

  “Hey, China.” He came up behind me and nuzzled the nape of my neck. He spoke with his lips against my skin. “Caitie is out there with a hair dryer, blow-drying two damp chickens on the picnic table. You know about this?”

  “I know.” I turned into his arms. “You should have been here when the rooster got his bath. Cursing in chicken language. Wild wing-flapping. A tsunami of epochal proportions.”

  McQuaid kissed me. “Sounds like a helluva party.” He chuckled and let me go. “Sorry I missed it. But them’s the breaks.” He opened the fridge, took out a bottle of Lone Star, and nimbly blocked Winchester with one foot. (Winchester makes a beeline for the fridge whenever it’s opened, hoping to snatch an unwary slice of leftover pizza.) He popped the top of his beer and gave the table settings a curious glance. “One, two, three. Four and five?”

  “Brian.” I began slicing the last hard-cooked egg. “And Casey.”

  There was a silence. “Ah,” McQuaid said thoughtfully. “I think I knew that. But I forgot.” After a moment, he cleared his throat and started again. “Casey is a lovely girl, really. And smart as the dickens. I don’t blame Brian for being smitten. Just takes some getting used to, that’s all. Makes me feel old, I guess. My little kid with a live-in, when he’s hardly old enough to vote.” He swigged his beer. “I hope they’re being . . . well, careful. Taking precautions, I mean.”

  “I’m sure they are,” I said cautiously. “Both of them are serious about school. And Casey is premed.” Which meant, I was sure, that she knew more about the birds and bees than I did at her age. (Not much of a comparison, actually, since I knew next to nothing.)

  “Right. But accidents happen.” He said this with a sheepish twist, and I remembered that he had once told me that Brian had been an accident. McQuaid’s first wife, Sally, had not wanted children, and after Brian was born, she had announced that her little boy would be an only child. To make her point irrevocably clear, she’d had her tubes tied—without discussing it with McQuaid.

  “I imagine they know what they’re doing,” I said in a reassuring tone, putting the salad bowl on the table. Our son Brian had brought his girlfriend to see us several times since they’d moved in together. McQuaid was absolutely right. Casey was as gorgeous as a fashion model, with an athletic figure, satiny dark skin, and very short black hair that accentuated the angular contours of her face.

  “I had it cut really short so I don’t have to fool with it,” she’d told me the last time they visited. “Between tennis and my classes,” she added ruefully, “I have more than enough to keep me busy.” That was an understatement. Casey is at the University of Texas on a tennis scholarship, which adds hours of practice and competition to the heavy load of her academic program.

  McQuaid turned the frosty beer bottle in his fingers. “Do you suppose they’ll be together this time next year?”

  The question was unanswerable, but I knew what had prompted it. McQuaid was wondering if Brian and Casey were considering marriage. And what he would say if the subject came up.

  “I can’t even guess,” I said honestly. “They’re young and living away from home for the first time. They’re exploring their freedom. But they’ve both got years of college ahead of them.”

  “I just hope the boy remembers that,” McQuaid said, and swigged his beer again.

  I didn’t say “He’s not a boy,” because I knew that McQuaid knows that, too. As you might expect, Brian’s choice of a live-in girlfriend has given both of us something to think about. But the question itself raises a question. Would we have to “think about” how we feel if Brian had moved in with a white girl?

  In the end, though, we’ve agreed that our son’s choice of someone to love is his choice. All he needs to hear from us is that his family loves and trusts him and is firmly in his corner. He can work out the rest—whatever that might be—on his own.

  McQuaid changed the subject. “We wrapped up the last interview on the fraud case this afternoon. Got the background work done last week, so all we have to do is write the report and we’re done.”

  He and Blackie Blackwell, his partner in their private investigations firm, had been hired by a large Austin law firm to do background checks on two dozen witnesses, conduct interviews, and prepare questions for depositions in a criminal fraud case the firm is preparing for trial. It’s the kind of job McQuaid enjoys, for it requires him to use all his investigative and interrogative skills. It’s the kind of job I approve of, too, because investigating and interrogating aren’t usually hazardous to my husband’s health. The other kind involves guns and dangerous people.

  “Got another client lined up?” I asked, reaching into the cupboard for dessert dishes. I’d baked a peach-and-carrot cobbler the day before. There was plenty left, so we’d have that for dessert, with peach ice cream.

  “Nope.” McQuaid put his empty beer bottle in the recycle bin. “But Blackie’s been tagged by Foremost to investigate an insurance scam in Lubbock. He left for there this morning and plans to be gone a week or so. He said to tell you that Sheila’s feeling a little bit better. She’s supposed to go back to work tomorrow, but he’d be grateful if you’d keep an ey
e on her.”

  “I’ll be glad to.” I chuckled. “But she won’t like it.”

  Sheila is Blackie’s wife, Pecan Springs’ first female police chief, and now the first pregnant female chief. She and Blackie are expecting a baby in November. Just last week, Smart Cookie (as her friends call her) put on a maternity uniform and broke the news to the city council and the police department. Her announcement, as you can imagine, caused a stir. This is, after all, good-old-boy country, and when it comes to running their cop shop, good old boys quite naturally prefer that other good old boys do it. Sheila’s job has held its challenges from Day One, and her pregnancy is making it several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are those in the department and on the council who would like to treat her as if she has a disability that disqualifies her as chief—or maybe it’s a communicable disease and she should be quarantined (in case pregnancy is contagious).

  Smart Cookie’s comeback: “Hey. I’m not disabled. I’m not sick. I’m pregnant. If you don’t know the difference, ask your wife. Or your mother.” Of course, all of this opposition makes her stubbornly want to appear as “normal” as possible. So even though she’s had a problem with persistent morning sickness—hyperemesis, the doctor calls it—she hates to miss work. And she won’t like the idea that her absent husband has asked a friend to keep an eye on her.

  But at least she knows that she’s working under a departmental policy that is friendly toward pregnant officers. She and other members of the department developed the policy last year, and the council approved it a few months ago. Sheila says she’s a test case—a “trial balloon.” I tell her she’s not that big yet. Just wait another couple of months.

  * * *

  • • •

  SUPPER was on the table when Brian and Casey arrived. Brian is almost as tall as his dad, with the same dark hair and pale blue eyes, the same firm jaw and broad shoulders. Together, they make the kitchen seem crowded. Casey filled the glasses with ice and poured the iced tea, McQuaid summoned Caitie from her chicken grooming session, and we all sat down to supper. The Moroccan lemon chicken with rice was a hit, everybody enjoyed the salad, and the peach-and-carrot cobbler provided a colorful conclusion.