—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”
WHEN EDEN RETURNED HOME after dropping Peg back at the Lodge, she went straight down to the henhouse. The lamp was on at Roddy’s place and Suzy’s truck was gone. Eden went first to Lorraine’s coop to check on her. They weren’t far from her hatching date now, and Lorraine was viciously defensive about her clutch. Only when Lorraine was off the nest could Eden get in there to make sure she had enough nesting material, stick in a few sprigs of wormwood to deter insects and pests. Eden poked her head into the coop for one, and before her eyes could even adjust, Lorraine was letting out a terrible crrrrrrawk crrrrrrrrrrrawk, loud and screeching. As far back as she and Eden went, if anyone tried to mess with those eggs, Lorraine’d peck their hands into bloody stumps before she’d let them have at her unhatched babies.
In the main coop old Margery lumbered off her roost the minute Eden entered and wobbled over to say hello. She was like a dog. Eden sank down into an old half-broken chair she’d set by the door, and lifted Margery up onto her lap. Eden stroked the hen’s feathers.
Once upon a time Eden had tried to teach Lorna how to care for the chickens, and the girl had been happy enough to cuddle the feather-puff babies but hadn’t really taken to it beyond that. Seemed you couldn’t teach a woman to mother any more than you could make a hen go broody. Lorna’d been willing enough to go walking with Eden, to help out with the osprey nesting platforms. The thing Lorna lacked, Eden thought, was initiative. Then she thought about why it was that people were always trying to figure out what it was that Lorna was lacking. Maybe they felt if they could isolate what made Lorna who she was they could more easily assure themselves that they weren’t like her, couldn’t be like her, that they were immune. It was that easy. There. Done. Eden—a veritable Napoleon of initiative— could look at Lorna and say, There, that’s it, that’s what she’s missing. That’s what she’s missing and that’s what I’ve got in spades! Therefore I am different from Lorna. Therefore I am safe.
It was all so flawed. So inherently and fundamentally and selfservingly flawed. And it helped them all through another day of their problems and kids and strife and grief. It was hard to imagine what the Islanders were going to do without Lorna. Who was going to step in to come up short in every comparison and make them all feel relatively better about their own pathetic lives? It was Osprey’s system of moral certitude. Sure, you could ask, What Would Jesus Do? But that was often a tough question to answer, because Jesus’ life, well, it was pretty different from their own. But at any time you could ask yourself, What Would Lorna Do? and it was pretty much certain that if you could manage to accomplish the exact opposite of whatever that was, you’d probably be just fine.
Now, What Would Chickens Do? That was a question that got you somewhere. Because what they’d do was actually about what you did. If you did what you were supposed to, the chickens followed in turn. You took care of them, gave them everything they needed: food, shelter, vitamins, place to run around, games to play—a head of lettuce in a netted bag on a string, say: tether-lettuce! They loved it!—mates to mate with, a job to do, eggs to lay, babies to raise . . . The occasional egg-eater notwithstanding, if you treated a chicken right, it treated you right in return. And to Eden’s way of thinking about things, that was exactly as it should be, and there was no reason for such a philosophy to stop with chickens. It hurt Eden’s heart to think of the havoc people wreaked through their own offhandedness, their own laxity, their own systems of ignorance and denial and fear. There were ways to live in the world that kept the world spinning! Why couldn’t people see that? And if they saw it—and this was Eden’s greatest heartsickness—if they saw it, why couldn’t they live it? Why wasn’t it cut and dried? If something was wrong with the chickens, you went in and figured out what was causing the trouble—Why were they eating their eggs? Why were they plucking out their vent feathers?—and you corrected the problem! Why—and this was maybe all that Eden had ever really wanted to know—why couldn’t we be more like the birds?
“Ma?” Roddy was calling from outside the coop. Margery hopped off Eden’s lap and flapped back to her roost. Eden pushed herself up from the chair and went outside.
Roddy looked anxious, in a sad way—a way that made Eden want to take her son in her arms—but when he spoke, his voice was flattened out. He kept his eyes down. “They’re leaving,” he said, “Suzy and Mia. She’s going back to New York.”
Eden waited, silent. Roddy was packing the ground with the heel of his boot. He said, “Everything I hear makes me more scared for Squee, about what Lance’s going to do.” He looked up at his mother. “Suzy said I should ask you about something, and I’m afraid you’re not going to give me a straight answer, and I need you to give me a straight answer on this. Suzy said you could probably tell me better than she could what happened to her . . . in high school? Out back here . . . down the ravine? With Lance?” Roddy paused to let his mother answer, but he was preparing the further assault of his interrogation. He wasn’t going to let her squirm away.
“She told you that?” Eden was saying, nodding her head in consideration as she spoke, as though this information meant something particular to her. “Suzy told you that,” she said again, not a question but confirmation of the facts as they stood.
Roddy nodded. “She said you’d tell me.” He looked at the ground. “She’s afraid of him, Ma.”
“Well, Christ!” Eden swore. “You’re talking about something that happened twenty years ago, and suddenly she’s so terribly afraid!” Then something struck her. This “fear” they were talking about, this fear Suzy was calling her reason to flee—who knew what was really driving that girl? Suzy could well be leaving to get away from Roddy for all Eden knew, and that thought roused in her a sudden and vicious anger toward Suzy—for being a coward and a conniver, and mostly for not loving Eden’s son the way he deserved to be loved. “I’ll tell you,” she said to Roddy, “I’ll tell you, but I don’t know it’ll shed any light on anything at all.”
They sat across from each other at the picnic table, mother and son, and she talked. It had been some sort of a party, maybe, Eden dimly recalled. There’d been people over, friends, kids from the school. Suzy had come with Chas, but he’d been unable to find her when he was ready to drive home and figured she’d left earlier, walked home. He took off alone. It was Eden who found her, just past midnight, soon after Chas had gone. She was behind the old woodshed, holding her knees to her chest, crying.
“I got it out of her, what had happened, to some degree. Enough to understand it hadn’t been something she’d particularly wanted to do . . .”
“So he did rape her?” Roddy asked cautiously.
Eden sighed. “Sure what I’d’ve called it. Then and now. Now maybe people’d agree with me. Then? Then she was more a girl who got herself in a bad situation. Nineteen sixty-eight, on this island? They’d for certain blame that one on her.”
“She got pregnant?” he asked skeptically. “You said Lance was . . . that he couldn’t, you know . . . so she didn’t get pregnant, right?”
Eden shook her head sadly. “But I didn’t know that—about Lance— for a good ’nother year later from Lorna.” She spoke hesitantly, measuring the words, still trying not to let go of more than she absolutely had to.