Part 1: All Must Go Today
The quiet was the first thing I noticed.
Forty laying hens are never quiet at two in the afternoon. There’s always one boasting about an egg, and three more arguing with her over it. My mother used to say you could set a clock by her hens. She said two o’clock sounded like a church basement just before the coffee was ready.
That Tuesday, the day after we buried her, the yard made no sound at all.
I’d spent the whole morning in town. Settling up at the funeral home. Hauling casserole dishes back to the church. Now I sat in my car with the engine off and a box of thank-you cards on the seat beside me, listening to the wind tug at the wire on the chicken run.
The little pop door on the coop stood open. The big door was open too, propped with the cement block Mom always used when she cleaned.
Not a single hen was in the run.
None under the lilac. None dusting herself in the bare spot by the propane tank, where thirty-five years of afternoons had worn a bowl into the ground.
Then I saw the sign.
It was a flap torn from a cardboard box, leaning against the mailbox post at the end of the lane. I’d driven right past it on the way in, busy trying to remember how to spell the organist’s last name.
I walked back down the lane to read it.
Black marker. My aunt’s tidy, slanted printing.
Laying hens. Two dollars each.
And beneath that, smaller:
All must go today.
I stood there in my funeral shoes, since I hadn’t thought to change them, while the April mud crept up over the sides.
Aunt Lucille met me at the kitchen door. She wore yellow rubber gloves and one of Mom’s aprons. Behind her, the kitchen smelled of bleach instead of coffee.
“There you are,” she said. “I’ve got the pantry about done. You would not believe what that woman kept.”
“Where are the hens?”
“It’s handled.”
She peeled off one glove, finger by finger.
“I called it in to the swap program on the radio this morning. And I put a sign out. They were gone by one o’clock. Every last one. People came with boxes. One man had a feed sack.”
“You sold them.”
“I sold them.”
She drew a bank envelope from the apron pocket and held it up the way you’d show off a good report card.
“Eighty dollars. I thought that was something, for a bunch of old chickens.”
I looked at the envelope.
“Forty hens,” I said. “Two dollars apiece.”
“The realtor comes Friday at ten, Annette. She said herself a place shows better without livestock. You can’t have a yard full of chicken mess and expect anybody from town to see past it.”
She laid the envelope on the kitchen table and squared it with the edge.
“Nobody has time for chickens. You work. Dale works. That boy has school. Somebody had to be sensible.”
I should explain about the realtor, because that part was partly my own fault.
Mom died in her sleep on a Thursday night. Her heart, the doctor said. Hardly any warning.
On Friday, I sat in the arrangements room at the funeral home with my head in my hands and said out loud that I had no idea what on earth we were going to do with the place.
I meant it the way you mean anything on a day like that. I meant I was tired.
Aunt Lucille heard a decision.
She’s seventy-eight. My mother’s older sister. She left the farm for Lincoln the week she finished high school and worked forty-one years in the claims office of an insurance company. In all that time, she never once left a file open on her desk overnight.
By Saturday, she’d found a realtor.
By Sunday, she’d moved into Mom’s spare room with a bucket and a box of trash bags.
I hadn’t the strength to stop her. And I figured there was time. I figured the worst thing that could happen before Friday was a clean pantry.
The place was coming to me. Mom and Dad had settled that years ago, and Lucille knew it as well as I did. She wasn’t robbing anybody. In her own mind, she was sparing me the trouble.
“Who bought them?” I asked.
“People.”
“Which people, Aunt Lucille?”
“People from the radio. I don’t know them. I don’t know anybody out here anymore.” She tugged the glove back on. “A young woman with a van full of children. A heavy man. Somebody’s hired man in a seed cap.”
“Did you write down a single name?”
“It was cash, honey. You don’t write a receipt for two dollars.”
“Not one name.”
She thought about it.
“One. An old man. Zeller. He said to tell you he’d taken twelve. He said it twice, like I was hard of hearing.”
So there it was.
I couldn’t pick up the telephone and undo it, because there was nobody to call. Forty hens had gone down that lane in the backs of strangers’ cars. And the only record was eighty dollars in a bank envelope.
I wanted to scream.
I’m forty-seven years old. I have never screamed at a relative in my life. I came closer that afternoon than I ever hope to come again.
But arguing with Lucille had never once, in all my years, changed what Lucille had already done. And it wouldn’t bring home a single hen.
And she was right about one thing, though not the way she meant it.
A laying hen in her second spring is worth fifteen dollars to anybody in York County who knows a hen from a hat. Two dollars is what a spent hen brings at the sale barn. The kind headed for somebody’s soup pot.
Whoever answered that radio call had either landed the bargain of the year, or meant to wring some necks.
Mom called the refrigerator the icebox her whole life. On top of it, pushed back against the wall, sat a red coffee can with a plastic lid gone cloudy with age.
I reached up and took it down.
That was her egg money.
She’d sold eggs out of that kitchen door since 1991, the year I turned twelve. That was the year she decided the hens were going to buy the groceries. Three dollars a dozen, lately. Two for most of the years before that. It all went into the can. And nearly all of it was ones.
I took off the lid and counted it out on the table, beside Lucille’s envelope.
A hundred and twelve dollars.
“What are you doing?” Lucille said.
“They paid two,” I said. “I’ll pay three.”
“For chickens.”
“For Mom’s.”
“Annette, you can’t even find them.”
“I can find twelve.” I put the money back in the can and pressed the lid down. “That’s a start.”
She had nothing sensible to say to that.
I picked up the can and went outside to call my husband.
Dale drives the anhydrous truck for the co-op. And the last week of April is no time to ask a co-op man for a day off. He’d already spent his three days of funeral leave standing beside me. Every farmer in the county wanted nitrogen on before the corn went in, and he was hauling tanks from before daylight until after dark.
He heard the whole thing out without interrupting. I could hear his truck idling.
“Two dollars,” he said finally.
“Two dollars.”
He went quiet for a second.
Dale loved my mother. She fed him every Sunday for twenty-two years and never once let him leave without a carton of eggs under his arm.
“Take my pickup,” he said. “The keys are on the hook. Put Duke’s crate in the back. The big wire one. It’ll hold six or eight if you don’t go far.”
Then he said, “Bring them home, Annie. I’ll be out there the minute I can.”
Our son, Colt, is fourteen.
I picked him up at school at three-thirty with the dog crate already in the truck bed and the coffee can on the seat. And I told him what his great-aunt had done.
He said nothing for about a mile.
Colt had been feeding those hens since he was big enough to carry the scoop. He’d fed them all four days since Mom died. Morning and night. He’d gathered the eggs and set them in the icebox on the back porch, the way she’d taught him.
“Did she sell Pearl?” he said.
“She sold all of them, honey.”
He gazed out the window at somebody’s planter crawling across a field.
“Pearl’s seven,” he said. “She lays about one egg a week. Whoever got Pearl is going to eat her.”
“Then we’d better get moving,” I said.
I had one name, and it wasn’t enough. So I drove to the feed store before it closed.
Lucille had tacked a card on the bulletin board there too. I pulled it down and handed it across the counter to Jeff, who’d sold my mother layer pellets and oyster shell for as long as I could remember.
He read it. His face changed.
“I wondered,” he said. “I heard it on the radio, and I thought, that’s not Rosalie’s voice, and that’s not Rosalie’s price.”
“Do you know anybody who went?”
“Kim Kroeker was in here at noon. Bought a sack of pellets. Told me she’d gotten eight hens for sixteen dollars and felt like a thief.”
He was already writing on the back of the card.
“North of Benedict. Second place past the church. Go on. She’s good people.”
She was.
Kim Kroeker came out onto her front step with a baby on her hip and two more children behind her. Before I’d finished saying my name, she said, “Oh, no. Oh, it was your mother.”
“It was.”
“I knew two dollars was wrong. I said so at dinner. I said, somebody’s grandma has died and somebody’s cleaning out, and I just didn’t know whose.” She shifted the baby. “I’ve got them penned by themselves. You don’t put strange hens in with your own the first week.”
By then it was getting on toward dusk. That’s the only sensible time to catch a chicken. A hen on the roost at dark will let you lift her off like a loaf of bread, as long as you hold her wings snug and keep the light out of her face.
Colt went in with the flashlight aimed at the floor.
He came out with a Rhode Island Red under each arm. He turned them toward me so I could see their legs.
A blue band on one.
A yellow band on the other.
Mom banded every bird she ever raised. A little plastic spiral on the right leg. A different color for each year’s hatch, so she always knew a hen’s age without guessing. Green for the birds from three springs back. Blue for the next year. Yellow for last spring’s pullets.
I’d never thought of it as anything but one of her fussy ways.
That week, those bands were the only proof we had.
We put eight hens in the crate.
The Kroekers’ little girl, maybe five years old, stood by the tailgate with her chin trembling. She’d named one of them Butterscotch that very afternoon.
Colt got down on one knee in the gravel.
“She’s going back to my grandma’s house,” he told her. “That’s where she’s from. You can come see her any Saturday. I’ll show you where she sleeps.”
I counted twenty-four ones out of the coffee can.
Kim Kroeker put her free hand behind her back.
“I can’t take more than I paid.”
“You bought them fair,” I said. “You fed them, and you penned them right. I don’t want anybody out a dime because of my family. Please.”
At last she took it.
Then she walked me to the truck door and said, low, so the children wouldn’t hear, “Is your aunt all right? She seemed like she was in an awful hurry to be finished with something.”
I turned that over in my mind most of the way home.
We let the eight hens loose in the coop by flashlight.
Every single one of them walked up the ramp and went to the exact same spot on the roost she’d left that morning. They shuffled and muttered and settled.
Colt latched the pop door. Then he stood there with his hand flat on it for a minute.
Lucille had left the yard light on. A plate of funeral ham sat in the oven, covered in foil. She’d gone to bed.
Before I went to sleep, I called the one name I had.
Mr. Zeller answered on the ninth ring.
He’s eighty-one. He still farms a little, south of town. He’s been a widower for three years.
I told him who I was and what I wanted, and that I’d pay him three dollars a hen and be glad to do it.
A long pause followed.
“Thursday,” he said.
“I could come tomorrow, Mr. Zeller. I don’t want to put you out.”
“Thursday. At dusk. Not before.”
And he hung up.
I knew Mom took him eggs. I didn’t know whether a man who says Thursday and hangs up on you is a man who means to help you.
