Osprey Island

“A cow!” Roderick exploded. “I’m a carpenter! Not a farmer! I am not raising goddamn cows!” And though the rage was bubbling deep inside him, the words that came out were nothing more than steam.

“Then we just won’t have milk,” Eden said, and the case seemed to close in her mind.

Eden and Roderick’s had never been a marriage of love, but a product of their time and circumstance: not companionable, but suitable. He paid the bills; she cooked the meals. Arguments, she won, which only sent him to the bar, or hunting, which was fine. In the end he did as he was told, and in turn she took care of him, which he couldn’t have done on his own. Like a governess and her ward, they were mutually dependent. They got on sufficiently to make it through the days together, and they did in fact make it through a good many days.

Eden Jacobs had never kept a rooster. No need. Not if you just raised hens for laying, that is. Those girls each put out a good eating egg every couple of days, no matter what—as long as you fed and kept them well and gave them a few hours under an electric light in winter when the days got short and temperatures brought production down. It was a lot easier to keep things under control without a rooster in the henhouse.

Eden liked the chicken shed full to about ten hens. She believed— firmly—in population control for humans, and she believed in it for birds. Naturally, in the late spring, early summer, a hen might start going broody: that biological imperative to amass a clutch of eggs and sit on them until they hatched. And sure, there were plenty of hybrid hens with the instinct for broodiness bred right out of them, but those, Eden thought, were birds for the egg- laying corporate empires. She didn’t believe in some kind of superchicken bred for human convenience. If she was going to raise her own, they were going to be honest-to-goodness, nonengineered, unsaccharine hens.

Mostly she raised them for eggs, but Eden liked a nice roast chicken or a broiler as much as the next person, and her chickens were safe and healthy to eat, not like the poisoned garbage they sold down at the IGA. So Eden raised dual-purpose birds—good for eggs and good for meat—and every so often she’d cull one from the flock and slaughter it. No business raising them if you’re not willing to do the work, she’d say. The killing and cleaning wasn’t her favorite job, but it was a necessary part of it all. To keep up with the ones she ate and the ones she inevitably lost to predators or the random undetected disease, about once a year Eden took a drive over to George Quincy’s place and borrowed a rooster for a week or so to mate with one of her girls and raise up another brood of baby chicks.

George Quincy had a sizable piece of land on the north end by Osprey Cove, and he’d been raising all sorts of critters out there for years, and those animals had kind of become his pastime and his family. George was happy enough to have Eden take one of his birds over to her place for a roll in the proverbial hay (hay actually made a very poor nesting litter for chickens, all those hollows to trap moisture—much better to use wood shavings, but that was a whole other issue . . .) with one of her hens.

In late May, soon after Roddy’s return to Osprey, Eden had driven over to George’s with a large cage in the back of her car to pick up Franklin, a remarkably good-natured Cherry Egger who’d already fathered a few of Eden’s broods in the past. George had been having some trouble mating his own birds that season, but he said he was nearly one hundred percent sure that Franklin wasn’t the problem.

“I think I got it figured out,” he’d said, as Eden climbed from her car. She went around back to collect the cage. “It’s the roost!” he declared, and he’d looked at that moment as happy as Eden had ever seen George Quincy. “Talked to a guy on the mainland—poultry guy—told me: check the roost. Sure enough, the thing’s getting wobbly. Poultry fellow said sometimes that’ll do it—eggs won’t fertilize right if you got a shaky roost.” George took the cage from Eden and stood by, beaming.

“If only it worked like that for people,” Eden had mused. “You got an unstable home and the kids’ll flat out refuse to get conceived. Oh, if only . . .”

George just stood there shaking his head, smiling thoughtfully, not quite following Eden’s train of thought but nonetheless appreciative.

After a moment he lifted the cage, recalling what Eden had come for. “Who’s going to be Franklin’s little lady this year?” he asked.

“Lorraine’s getting broody, I’m pretty sure,” Eden said. “The New Hampshire Red?”

George nodded his recollection. “She’s been through this before.”

“With Franklin, even, if memory serves . . . three, four years back?”

George was still nodding, scuffling his feet in the dirt, eyes down. “Think so,” he said. “I think so, yeah.”

Lorraine was about seven, had been born right out back at Eden’s. She was quiet, motherly, a little neurotic, but she handled well and wasn’t fussy. Some chickens were just plain stupid creatures—peckish, nervous, brainless beasts. You didn’t lose sleep over slaughtering one of them. Some of them practically sprawled themselves across the chopping block, as if they knew that’s where they’d been headed all along. Those were the ones to eat: the idiots. And the boys.

And then there were chickens like Lorraine, or like Paulette, or Margery. Eden’d had Margery since she’d started the whole coop— from the very first shed that Roderick had built, under grudging and grumbling duress. Margery was about as old as a chicken could get, had spent probably six, seven summers total in the coop for one, broody, sitting on her eggs. She was a good mother, but Eden had put her into retirement, let her rest in her dotage. Margery’d been with her through it all. For Eden, on Osprey Island—which is to say: for Eden, in this world— Margery the hen was about the closest thing she had to a friend. Margery was the sort of friend Eden respected. She made her needs known when she had them, and otherwise she minded her business. Eden thought—in new ways every day, it seemed—how much there was that people could learn from chickens. At the school— Eden knew through Reesa, who’d heard it from her kids—at the school they called her the Bird Lady. No doubt they meant to mock her, to poke fun at a strange old lady, as kids were wont to do. But the name, and the notion, had simply tickled Eden. She could imagine a lot of worse things.

So in late May that year Eden had gone to fetch George Quincy’s Cherry Egger cock, Franklin, and for a week or so she’d let Franklin and Lorraine do their thing, vent to vent, as it were. When Lorna used to help Eden with the chickens, she’d told Lance about the mating process and he’d been amazed: “A cock’s got a vent? You’re telling me a cock’s got no cock?!” He’d say to Lorna, or to Eden when he saw her: “How’s the cockless cock?” “You’ve got so much to learn,” Eden’d say back to him. “You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn, Mister Lance.”

And you could learn a lot from chickens, though a rooster was different from a man in some ways. It took seven days, sometimes more, for the rooster’s sperm to get where it needed to go. Then it got stored in its own sperm nest inside the hen for another couple weeks, just waiting there, patiently. A hen was born with her whole lifetime of yolks stored up in her ovaries. And those yolks, in a healthy girl, passed down pretty regularly, every day, every other day. The sperm cells just sat there, waiting for that daily yolk to pass by on its way to becoming an egg and getting laid. The sperm jumped aboard as the yolk traveled by, and there: a fertilized egg. An egg with the potential for chickenhood.