by Joy Cowley
“Not chickens. And not like you say—” Annalee’s face was scrunched up into lines of effort. “Semolina is very smart and I think she’s special, but—let’s not discuss this, Josh.”
“I told you,” Josh said. “She started just like a parrot. A few words. Then more. But not to other people. There are parrots who only speak to their owners. I read that somewhere.”
Annalee whirled around. Her face smoothed out, and her eyes widened. “It’s there again!”
“What?”
“The scratching on the door—only I think it’s more a tapping.”
Josh heard it too. That crazy old Semolina was turning his lie into the truth. He opened the door and saw her crouched on the top step as though she were laying an egg. “So you changed your mind,” he said. “Okay. Come in, and hurry. It’s hot outside.”
She stood up, shook herself, and small puffs of dust rose from her feathers. Then, taking her time, she arched her feet over the step and onto the floor. She didn’t look at Josh. A few more steps and she flew up to the sorting bench to sit beside Annalee.
Josh laughed. “I don’t know why she’s still mad at me. It was Grandma who knocked her off the table.”
The membranes closed over Semolina’s eyes as fast as a camera shutter.
“Poor Semolina!” Annalee raised pink pointed fingers and stroked the reddish brown feathers from head to neck to back. “I hope she wasn’t hurt.”
Semolina opened her beak and made a soft cawing noise like a dove.
“She likes me,” Annalee said.
“Of course she does. If she didn’t like you so much, she wouldn’t poke her beak in here. She’s gotten very political about it.”
Annalee had turned her hand over so that the backs of her nails combed the chicken’s feathers. “You mean, the eggs?”
“Uh-huh. You know how she describes us eating eggs? Murder. Don’t ask me how she got a word like murder. I told her eggs don’t turn into chickens if they aren’t fertile. So she goes on about roosters too, how biggies kill all newly hatched roosters.”
“Biggies?”
“That’s what she calls human beings, remember? She thinks people are cruel monsters. I told her most slugs and snails think chickens are evil. She doesn’t take notice. Semolina can never bear to lose an argument—” Josh stopped. Annalee’s face was a closed door and her fingers, trailing over Semolina’s wing tips, were slow and without direction.
The Annalee of last year had believed him. She had wanted him to repeat every word Semolina said, and once, on the porch swing, she begged the old hen to talk to her too. But a year away at school had changed more than her body—it had done something to her mind as well. Now he sometimes felt that he and Annalee were living on different planets. He picked up Semolina and put her on the floor. “We’d better get these eggs done,” he said.
Annalee looked sideways at him. “I’m sorry, Josh.”
“It’s okay.”
“You’re my friend. Semolina’s my friend.”
“I know.” But the truth of it was he didn’t know. He pulled down some empty cartons from the top shelf and moved farther down the bench.
Suddenly Annalee squealed and jumped backward. Then she laughed with her hand over her mouth. “Semolina! Oh, Josh, she just picked at my toe ring.”
Semolina advanced, wings spread, neck stretched low to the ground, eye fixed on the shining silver bar behind the pink toenail. But Annalee was too quick. She pulled her foot back. The old hen paused, and in that instant, Josh grabbed her. “Semolina, that’s not nice!”
“She likes it!” Annalee cried. “Look at her. She can’t take her eyes off it.”
“It’s shiny, that’s why.”
Then Annalee did an amazing thing. She drew her knee up to her chin and said, “She can have it. It’ll be Lady Semolina’s leg ring.” With that she slid the band of silver off her toe, and Josh saw that it wasn’t a ring at all but a thin strip of metal bent almost in a circle. It could fit any size. Annalee held it toward Josh. “Lift her up and I’ll put it on her.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.” Gently, Annalee bent the silver around Semolina’s scaly right leg. When she let it go, the ring fell down to the top of the foot and hung like a bracelet. Annalee laughed. “It looks so elegant!”
“But it’s yours,” said Josh. “He—someone gave it to you.”
“Oh, Bob won’t mind. Put her down, Josh. Let’s see how it looks when she walks.”
Josh expected Semolina to peck at it and make a fuss, but she didn’t. She walked across the sorting shed floor with her head bent, foot lifted high.
“What do you think of that?” Josh asked her.
“Cool!” said Semolina.
It had happened. Semolina had talked. He looked at Annalee, whose eyes were wide with shock. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
“She said—cool!”
“Yeah. She forgot herself. Well done, Semolina. Now say thank you to Annalee.”
Semolina raised the ringed foot and put it down again.
“Say something else,” Josh insisted.
Annalee crouched in front of the hen. “Say cool again. Please?”
Semolina blinked. “Caw. Caw-caw-caw.”
“Oh.” Annalee stood up. “My mistake. It was just a chicken noise.”
“No, it wasn’t! She said cool, and then she said caw to cover up her mistake. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Semolina?” Josh waited, but the cunning old bird wasn’t saying a word. That did it for Josh. He picked her up, carried her to the door like an old feather duster and set her on the ground. “Go back to the house and talk to Grandma,” he said.
Softly, in a hen noise the size of a whisper, she said, “Aw, shut your beak,” and stalked off, jingling the silver ring on her right leg.
Chapter Four
NO ONE COULD EXPLAIN WHY a boy raised on a chicken farm, hundreds of miles from the sea, was so fascinated by boats. Josh couldn’t explain it himself. While other toddlers wheeled plastic cars across the carpet chanting, “Brrrm, brrm!” Josh had climbed on a chair and sailed his drinking cup around the kitchen sink. When he was four, Tucker took him down to the Grayhawk River at the back of the Binochettes’ farm and together they made boats from folded magazine pages to sail on a slow brown current that sucked and swallowed their little paper craft. Even then Josh wanted to make a boat that wouldn’t sink.
He collected pictures of ships, everything from Spanish galleons and Chinese junks to oceangoing liners, and for the bathtub, he made toy boats with propellers powered by twisted rubber bands.
Last winter, Tucker and Elizabeth had promised to drive him clear across five states to the California coast, where waves crashed on white sand beaches and boats sat side by side in huge parking lots called marinas. That was before the baby began.
“Don’t worry. We’ll do it as soon as the baby’s big enough to travel,” promised Tucker. “We’ll take a boat trip to Catalina Island and you can swim with those seeing glasses, taste the salt. It’s a different world under the ocean.”
“He’s already tasted the sea.” Elizabeth smiled.
“When?” said Josh. “I don’t remember.”
Elizabeth put her hand on her stomach. “Before a baby’s born, it swims in a little sea inside its mother. It’s called amniotic fluid. The little sea is salty just like the big sea.”
“How did I breathe in it?” Josh asked.
“You didn’t,” she replied. “Babies breathe when they leave the little sea for the dry land. But they remember the little sea. The salt is in their blood. It’s in their tears.”
Tucker drummed his fingers on the table. “Next year, California. This year, son, you’ll build a real boat.”
Josh sat bolt upright. “Spittin’ bugs, Dad! You mean that? What kind of boat?”
“Oh, I dunno. I reckon a skiff like in those old Popular Mechanics magazines, beechwood frame, double-skin ply. You can paddle it on the river. Might
even get a little outboard motor, go upstream fishing.” Tucker laughed his long slow laugh. “I guess building a boat will take about as long as building a baby, and it’ll be just as much a blessed miracle.”
Josh’s boat grew in the tractor shed. The skiff was eight feet long and nearly three feet wide, with a shallow V bottom and flotation blocks under the seats in the bow and stern. Tucker had helped Josh cut the frames from laminated beech wood and shown him how to steam ply panels for the hull over the old boiler. The panels, warm and wet, bent easily along the curves of the frame, nesting tight against the keel. Tucker fastened the ply covering with bronze screws that wouldn’t rust no how, no way. After that, though, Josh did all the work himself, with his father keeping an eye on things by pretending he needed to come into the shed for tools.
When egg sorting was over, Josh worked on his boat. The skiff was upside down on the concrete floor and Josh was caulking the plywood joins when Semolina waddled in, the silver ring glinting on her right foot. She walked right up to the can of caulking cement.
“Watch that stuff,” Josh said, pointing with his knife. “It sets hard as rock. Dip your beak in that and you’ll never open it again.”
She shifted to a safe distance and pulled her head in against her body.
“I was only joking,” Josh said. “You still mad at me on account of Grandma? That’s not my doing. Grandma is Grandma. You know, she’s not as crabby as she looks. You can still come in my window.”
Semolina hopped onto a drum of engine oil and became busy pecking an itch under her wing feathers.
“You got nothing to say?” Josh shrugged and went back to spreading the paste over the plywood seams. If he didn’t do a good job on this, the gaps would become leaks. With the putty knife he eased the paste into the cracks. He glanced up at Semolina. “I never knew a chicken so moody. What’s wrong with you?”
For answer, Semolina’s claws rattled on the oil drum as she turned her back to him.
“Aw, come on, Semolina. Who are you mad at? Grandma? Me? Or yourself? You talked in front of Annalee. The silver ring did it. You forgot, didn’t you?”
Semolina groomed the feathers under the other wing.
“You could have said more. With Mom and Dad, I get your point, but Annalee? Put yourself in my shoes. It’s bug-spittin’ embarrassing her thinking I make it up. You like Annalee, so what’s the problem?”
She did an all-over feather shake that sounded like a shower of hail. Then she stretched her neck toward the boat and said, “That thing going on Grayhawk River?”
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“The back of Annalee’s place. It’ll fit on Dad’s trailer. Me and Annalee are going upriver to fish, and don’t worry, you’re not invited.”
She clacked her beak in disapproval. “Water ain’t natural—except for drinking.” She paused and clucked twice, a cooing sound. “The brown kind,” she said hopefully.
“No!” Josh pointed his caulking knife at her. “No more brew.”
“I got extra news for you.”
“Semolina! I can’t. That’s definite. Good-bye apple pie. Hard cheer, no brew.”
“What’s with the apple pie?”
“I don’t know. I made it up. I’m just trying to tell you, Semolina. I couldn’t get you brown water if I tried.”
She fixed him with a yellow eye. “The fox is wanting more eggs.”
“You’re kidding!” He sat back on his heels. “More?”
“That’s what I said, buddy. He’s got a racket going with raccoons, rats, ferrets, some bears. Maybe not the bears. Those girls in house three like a good story. But the old fox wanting more eggs, that’s no story. If they don’t deliver, then he switches to eating chickens, quick as a blink. Better tell your father.”
“Semolina, my father is definite there hasn’t been a fox around these parts for years. He thinks I’m making it up. You talk to him! He’s a nice guy. If he catches that old fox, he’ll serve you Grandma’s brew for the rest of your days.”
“No.”
“Semolina, please! Give me a break!”
She turned her head away.
“I can get you ginger ale, lemonade, cold tea with lemon. Look, I bring you Grandma’s pancakes, don’t I? You had the bowl of leftover whipped cream.” He scooped up some more caulking cement. “Dad says no way can the fox get those eggs.”
“There’s a hole,” she said.
He shook his head. “No hole. I been over the number-three chicken house about a hundred times and there’s no hole for a fox to get in.”
“There is a hole,” she repeated.
“Tell me where,” he demanded.
Slowly, she turned to face him. “I’ll tell you when you get me brown water.”
“Semolina, you drive me crazy!” He put down the putty knife and held out his hands to her.
She flew from the oil drum and collided with his chest, knowing that he would catch her. He scratched the back of her neck as she settled her head against his neck. “You are one terrible old bird,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Brown water,” she replied.
When Grandma went with them on hospital visits, Josh and his dad didn’t get much talking space. Grandma took over her daughter, telling her how to look after herself, what to say to the doctors and nurses, what she should be doing for the baby.
“Be positive, Elizabeth. Don’t even think of popping it out.”
“I don’t,” said Elizabeth.
“What we believe will be our reality, Elizabeth. Strong thoughts make a strong child. No room for any of your slippy-sloppy fatalistic stuff.”
“Yes, Mother.” Elizabeth Miller smiled and reached out to ruffle Josh’s hair.
“Your problem always, Elizabeth, is you get too easily discouraged,” Grandma said. “As a child you bent every which way the wind blew. You didn’t get that from my side of the family.”
“No, Mother.”
Grandma reached into her knitting bag and pulled out a tiny knitted coat. “Green suits a girl or a boy. Natural fibers, Elizabeth. Pure wool off a sheep’s back. I’ve always thought it a shame I could never teach you how to knit.”
Later that day, when Josh and Tucker were putting grain into the chicken feeders, Josh said, “Why is Grandma like that?”
“Like what, son?”
“So picky, so scratchy mean to Mom.”
Tucker spread a rain of yellow wheat off the end of his shovel and dust danced in the sunlight. “She ain’t mean, Josh. She loves your mother to pieces, but she’s never let go of the little girl that was once hers. Elizabeth knows and she takes it all kindly.”
Josh had a small shovel with a cutoff handle, but he worked as hard as Tucker, the muscles on his arms moving like snakes. “I wish she’d be, you know, nice.”
“Nice comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Tucker. “Your grandma’s got a good heart, bless her, but she worries too much. That’s the way of picky people. They need lots of love to make them stop picking on others. Bible says so.”
“Does it?”
“Well, if it doesn’t, it should. Your grandma’s been mighty lonely since Grandpa died. You could pass more time with her. She’d like that.”
Josh was silent. It wasn’t easy to sit with a grandmother who wiped a toothpaste smudge off the corner of your mouth with a spit-wet handkerchief and looked in your ears to see if you washed.
Tucker emptied another sack of wheat into the trailer. “Price of wheat’s gone up, egg count down again—the teeter-totter of economics, Josh.”
“Number-three house?”
“Yup. Way down yesterday. Only fourteen dozen eggs. It’s not easy, son. Insurance don’t pay all the hospital either. We should be down-on-our-knees grateful your grandma’s working here for nothing.”
Wheat dust filled Josh’s nose and throat, and he coughed. “Dad, you’re sure it’s not a fox getting the eggs? What if it was really a fox, and maybe raccoons and other
critters?”
Tucker had heard Josh’s fox theory so often, he would not waste more breath on it. He pushed his shovel into the mound of wheat on the trailer. “I just reminded myself. Yesterday Annalee went home without her pay. You mind running over to the Binochettes’ when you finish here?”
Josh agreed a mite too quickly. His father looked up and smiled. “Didn’t think it’d be any hardship,” he said.
Grandma was one of those worry wrinkles that Josh couldn’t quite straighten out. He knew she thought the Binochette family was up there with the president and the Queen of England. She would have jumped at a chance to go to the Binochette farm with him, but he deliberately didn’t ask her. I’ll make up for it, he promised himself. I’ll help her with supper. I’ll do the dishes. He tucked the pay envelope into the pocket of his overalls and made off, lickety-split, past the chicken houses, through the fence and over green fields of summer grass. He had long legs like his father, but he went so fast they were shaky by the time he got to the Binochettes’ front porch. Annalee and Harrison were sitting on the step with playing cards spread around them. Josh stopped on the path and bent over, hands on his knees, to get his breath back.
“Hi, Splosh,” said Harrison. “Two aces, a king and a queen. Beat that.”
Annalee stood up and swept her hair back. It was hanging loose on her shoulders like a black waterfall. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“No.” He felt in his pocket. “Dad said he didn’t give you your pay.”
“Oh, that.”
She walked toward him, and again he inhaled the mist of flowers that seemed to hang around her hair. It made him aware that his clothes were steeped in chicken smell and wheat dust.
“I could have gotten it next week,” she said.
Harrison had scooped up the cards and was shuffling them awkwardly, dropping them between his fingers. Josh was pleased to see his clumsiness, and then he felt bad for being pleased.
Harrison smiled up at him. “Now she can buy a new dress to go out with her boyfriend.”
Josh didn’t say anything. He could shuffle cards when he was only seven. He never dropped them. For a while he stood on the path in front of Annalee, who had the pay envelope squished between two hands as though she didn’t know what to say either. Then he nodded, the way his father sometimes did, and turned to walk away.