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.
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.