Osprey Island

Each day that spring when she collected the eggs from the coop, Eden let Lorraine’s eggs be. When she’d laid about ten or so, she stopped, and began to set. Franklin was sent home to George, his work at Eden’s done.

On the day Lorraine had started to set, Eden calculated three weeks down the road and put the hatching date around Fourth of July weekend. Lorraine seemed well for a broody hen, feathers all puffed, her buk buk buk low and constant and contented. Such drive and devotion—these things impressed and inspired Eden. There were few people in the world Eden respected the way she respected some of those hens.

That morning Eden set out some feed and then sneaked into the coop to collect eggs while the hens bustled about their meal. She hadn’t had the time to go pick up her weekly cache of oyster shells from Abel Delamico, so she gave the girls some extra kale and collards and promised herself to stop by Abel’s fish market that day. The oyster shells were for calcium, and you needed to make sure the hens got enough so they didn’t resort to eating their own eggs to get it. And then you also had to make sure you ground up the oyster shell finely enough and mixed it well into the feed so that the birds never knew they were eating shell, because that could make them think that eating shell was an acceptable practice and lead them to eat their own eggs, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid in the first place. You worried all the time about the quality of the eggs your hens were producing, and then the minute an egg got laid you had to worry about getting it out from under the bird before she broke it somehow and got tempted to have a taste. Or before she started going broody and got herself set on laying a whole clutch for hatching. Because a hen didn’t go broody when it was convenient for you. A hen went broody whenever she damn pleased. But if she went broody over a nestful of unhatchable, unfertilized eggs, then you were going to be in for a time of it, trying to break her brood. You’d have to get her out of the coop, away from any eggs—because she’d take someone else’s to set on if she was really fixed on brooding —and keep her in a hanging cage with cold air blowing on her rear end to get her out of the hatching mood entirely. An untimely brood was no fun for anyone.

Some folks said that chickens were about the easiest critters in the world to raise, but that, Eden thought, was only if you were keeping the specially bred broody-free birds, or if you kept hens and cocks and were happy enough to let them play and lay and hatch as they pleased. Eden’s coop was a tightly run house, and such order did not happen on its own.

Eden was changing the water beside Lorraine’s nest when she heard the door of Roddy’s shack close. She hustled back outside.

“Roddy!” she called.

He lifted a hand. “Hey, Ma.”

She shrugged the sweat and stray hair off her face with a shoulder, her henhouse-dirty hand up in the air. “You heading to the Lodge?” she asked.

“Heading to the Lodge,” he repeated, his voice strained with the tired patience grown men use to talk to their mothers.

“Could you check in at Lance’s? When you go down? Check on Squee, make sure he’s OK. I’m worrying . . .”

Roddy stopped on the path and turned toward the chicken coop. The controlled annoyance was gone from his voice, replaced by a directed urgency. “Lance came for him here last night?”

Eden nodded. “You were busy . . .” She gestured toward his shack.

“Ah, shit.” Roddy rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. He looked tired. “Yeah,” he assured his mother. “I’ll stop in.”

The Islanders thought Eden strange, and Eden might concede the point. She might even admit a sort of pride in that classification. When Eden looked at Roddy, she saw that her son was also maybe what people would call strange. He’d been a particular child, and he’d become a particular man, and a peculiar man, and Eden liked that about him. It marked, she felt, a certain freedom in his spirit. It marked him as her son. Eden had missed Roddy terribly after he’d left Osprey, and though she regretted the circumstances under which he’d gone, she also felt pride. Roderick had forbidden her to speak of it at the time, which was fine, since there was no one on the island to whom she might speak of such a thing. No one with whom to share the joy and triumph she felt when her son had said no to that ugly war.

Fifteen

IF THE PRICE WERE TREACHERY

The osprey should, in all honesty, have been named in its genus, for King Nisus of Alcathous, whose daughter, Scylla, sacrifices him to his attacking enemy, Minos, whom Scylla loves. But Minos rebukes her, disgusted by her betrayal of her father, and he quits the land she offers him. Scylla, mad with despair, jumps into the ocean to follow Minos’ retreating ship, and is followed by her father—now turned into an osprey—who plucks her from the water as such a bird of prey is wont to do. Regard: Her father saw her as he hovered near (changed to an osprey now with tawny wings) And swooped to seize and tear her, as she clung, With his hooked beak.

—A.D. MELVILLE, trans., “Scylla and Minos,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Would that the early ornithologists had more closely read their Ovid.

—DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

SUZY WORKED THROUGH THE MORNING at the Lodge darning blankets and bed linens on a relic of a sewing machine she’d unearthed in the maid’s room and managed to render functional. When the Irish girls broke for lunch, Suzy went up the hill toward her parents’ place. The sun was high overhead, beating down on the Chizek house. Suzy could hear the air conditioner as she approached, a window unit installed at her mother’s demand. It blew exhaust against the scrappy rosebushes Nancy had planted there in an inadequate attempt at camouflage.

Nancy Chizek was a finicky woman, but not necessarily thorough. She liked the edges of her world tucked and trimmed, but was famous for cutting corners in ways that were at best unceremonious and at worst downright tacky. She had lobbied for the air conditioner with the insistence of, say, one in line for a heart transplant. Then, once the thing was in, the offense of its unsightliness became the bane of her existence—a topic she brought up not only to complain of her husband’s stinginess, but because she found such a topic interesting and worthy of lengthy discussion. Finally she’d bought a few twiggy, thorny starter rose bushes at Kmart, planted them herself, and then neglected their care entirely. The rose “bushes” were two feet tall, the air conditioner at least four feet off the