Part 2: What the Carton Said
Wednesday morning at eight, I called the radio station.
The fellow who runs the swap program didn’t make me explain it twice. At five minutes past nine, between a man selling a hay rake and a woman looking for canning jars, he read it out just as I’d given it to him.
He said that forty laying hens had been sold Tuesday from Rosalie’s place northwest of York. That they’d been sold by mistake, the day after her funeral. And that her daughter would be grateful to buy back any that could be spared, at three dollars apiece.
He gave out Mom’s phone number.
Then he added something of his own.
“Folks,” he said, “most of you have eaten that woman’s eggs.”
The telephone in Mom’s kitchen rang eleven times before noon.
Two of the calls were about hens. The other nine were egg customers, calling to say they were sorry.
A woman named Connie, over by Waco, had six. She’d turned them straight in with thirty red hens of her own and couldn’t tell one from another.
“Look at their right legs,” I said.
She set the telephone down. When she came back, she was laughing.
“Well, I’ll be. Your mother was a smarter woman than I am.”
That was eighteen dollars. She sent us home with a jar of chokecherry jelly besides.
The other call was a man out past Bradshaw.
He wasn’t laughing.
His name was Denny. He was about sixty-five, retired off the railroad, and he kept a neat little henhouse with a new tin roof.
He met us in the yard with his arms folded.
He had five of Mom’s hens. He hadn’t penned them apart. They were already scratching around with his own.
“I about didn’t call,” he said. “They’re laying good. I got three eggs out of those five this morning, and that’s the day after hauling them. I paid what was asked. I didn’t cheat anybody.”
“No, sir, you didn’t,” I said. “You did nothing wrong. That’s why it’s three and not two. And if you say no, I’ll thank you for your time and go home, and I won’t think one bit less of you.”
He looked over at Colt.
Colt had walked to the fence. He stood very still with one hand held low, the way Mom had taught him.
A red hen with a blue band came across that yard at a trot. She stopped right at Colt’s boots and squatted flat, wings a little out. The way a hen will for somebody she knows.
“That’s one of ours,” Colt said. “I helped Grandma band the blue ones. I held them.”
Denny unfolded his arms.
“Well, shoot,” he said.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“My mother kept hens. If somebody had sold hers out from under the casket, my dad would’ve gone to every farm in Hamilton County.”
He went into his shed and came back with a wire catching hook.
“Don’t wait for dark. I’ll get them. You’ll never catch that speckled one without it.”
He took the fifteen dollars, too. He said a man ought to take what’s offered when it’s offered honest.
That made nineteen hens back on Mom’s roost by Wednesday night. And fifty-seven dollars gone out of the can.
Dale arrived at half past nine, still in his work coveralls and smelling of ammonia.
He didn’t come into the house first. He went straight to the coop with a trouble light and a handful of tools. And he fixed the latch on the pop door that Mom had been tying shut with baling twine since Christmas.
When he came in, Lucille was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe. She hadn’t gone to bed that night.
“Evening, Lucille,” he said.
That was all he said to her.
He washed his hands at Mom’s sink and ate what was in the oven. When he was done, he looked at me.
“How many?”
“Nineteen.”
“How many to go?”
“Twenty-one. Twelve tomorrow, if Mr. Zeller’s a man of his word. Nine I can’t find.”
Lucille turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer.
“I didn’t know they had bands,” she said. Nobody had asked her. “She never told me they had bands.”
Dale looked at her for a long moment.
And I’ll always be grateful for how he said the next thing. Because he could have said it a good many other ways.
“Rosalie would’ve told you anything you asked her, Lucille. She’d have walked you out there and shown you every one.”
My aunt stood up. She rinsed her cup. She went down the hall.
Thursday at dusk, we drove to Mr. Zeller’s.
He was waiting by his henhouse in bib overalls and a canvas chore coat, hands in his pockets.
“You’re Rosalie’s girl,” he said.
“Yes, sir. This is my son, Colt.”
He nodded at Colt as if that settled something.
I had the money counted out ahead of time. Thirty-six ones with a rubber band around them. I held them out.
He didn’t take his hands out of his pockets.
“Put that away.”
“Mr. Zeller, I mean to pay. You bought them fair, the same as everybody.”
“I know you mean to. I won’t sell you those hens, Annette.”
Colt looked at me.
I stood there holding my dead mother’s egg money, the wind cutting through my jacket. And I honestly did not know what kind of man I was talking to.
Mr. Zeller turned and climbed his porch steps. Slowly. One hand on the rail.
He was gone long enough that I could hear my own heart.
When he came back out, he carried an egg carton. He held it in both hands, level, like something that might spill.
It was one of Mom’s.
I knew it before he reached the bottom step. She reused her cartons until they fell apart. Her customers brought them back empty every week, and every time she refilled one, she wrote on the lid in pencil. A name. The day she packed it. How many. When the lid filled up, she turned it and wrote down the side.
“Read it,” he said.
The lid was gray with old pencil. Line after line. Zeller, and a date, and 1 doz. Dozens and dozens of them, most too rubbed out to read.
But the last line was clear. Because nobody had ever written over it.
Zeller. No charge. Tell Dorothy the brown ones are for her.
“That was my wife’s last week,” he said. “Three years ago in March. Your mother came up this porch every Saturday for fourteen months while Dorothy was sick. And she never took a dime. Not once. I tried. I’d put two dollars in her coat pocket and find it under my sugar bowl.”
He cleared his throat.
“Dorothy couldn’t keep much down toward the end. She could keep down a soft egg.”
I couldn’t see the carton anymore.
Colt took it out of my hands so I wouldn’t drop it.
“I heard that radio Tuesday morning,” Mr. Zeller said. “I knew the place. And I knew that wasn’t her on the telephone. And I knew what kind of man buys a two-dollar hen.”
He looked off toward his henhouse.
“I went as fast as I go. Your aunt had sold twenty-eight by the time I got my boots on. I took what was left. It wasn’t my place to tell a grieving family its business. But it was my place to see that twelve of her hens didn’t get their necks wrung.”
He shrugged.
“I’ve been boarding them. That’s all. A man doesn’t charge for boarding.”
“Why Thursday?” Colt asked.
It was the first thing he’d said. And Mr. Zeller very nearly smiled.
“Open it, son.”
Colt lifted the lid.
Twelve brown eggs. Every one wiped clean. Every one set in with the small end down, the way Mom always did.
“A hen goes off laying when you move her,” Mr. Zeller said. “They gave me four the first day and three the second. It took until about four o’clock this afternoon to make the dozen. And I was not going to hand Rosalie’s daughter eleven eggs.”
I’m not a woman who cries in front of people.
I’d made it through the visitation and the service and the cemetery with a dry handkerchief.
I cried in that old man’s yard until my son put his arm around me.
He’s taller than I am now. I hadn’t noticed until that very minute.
Mr. Zeller had the twelve hens penned by themselves, with fresh straw and their own waterer. He’d cut air holes in three apple boxes. He lifted the last hen out himself and held her a moment before he handed her to Colt.
A big old Barred Rock. Gray as a rainy day. Her red leg band had faded so far it was nearly pink.
“This one’s no layer,” he said. “I expect you know that.”
“That’s Pearl,” Colt said. His voice cracked on it. “You got Pearl.”
“I got her first,” Mr. Zeller said. “Nobody was going to want her for anything but the pot.”
I asked him to come Saturday. I told him there’d be coffee.
He said he’d think about it. Which, from a man like that, means yes.
Thirty-one hens went to roost in my mother’s coop that night.
Pearl took her place at the end by the window, where she’s slept since Colt was in second grade.
Friday morning, I went out to the back porch to check on the eggs.
Mom kept a second icebox out there. An old round-shouldered one that hummed. That was where the egg business lived. It was the only thing in that whole house Lucille hadn’t scrubbed.
I opened it.
Fourteen cartons, stacked two deep. And beside them, the bowl of loose eggs Colt had gathered since.
Mom had packed those cartons the Thursday she died. For the Saturday she didn’t live to see.
Every lid carried a name in fresh pencil. Pavlik, 2 doz. Schmidt. Pastor. The school cook. Fourteen names, in the same handwriting that had signed my report cards.
A fifteenth carton sat on the door shelf. Off by itself.
I heard Lucille come out behind me.
She had her car keys in her hand and her good coat on. I understood that she’d been about to tell me she was going home to Lincoln.
I said nothing.
I took the fifteenth carton off the shelf and held it so she could read the lid.
Lu. Sunday. No excuses.
